Amanda and I loved the King’s Speech – a wonderfully executed film. Despite my predisposition for disliking Colin Firth (mainly because every girl I know thinks he’s amazing, including my good lady wife), he’s really very good in it and Geoffrey Rush is pretty spectacular.

Watching the film did bring back memories of doing speech exercises when we were young with my Dad. Mr David Snr had a number of speech training lessons has a 20-something in London and wanted to relay them to us – so we would grow up confident, capable of projecting and never have to deal with confidence issues as adults.

We did some of the things in the clip below, in addition to reading Lincoln’s speeches whilst walking on a treadmill, doing lots of “lalalalalas”, dancing around the living room and singing (badly) to Boney M tracks. We’d whisper and try to project to the back of the room whilst reading speeches, we’d bounce and shout and sing. We didn’t thank him much for it at the time, although it was impossible not to enjoy the Boney M part of it…

At school, I took more of my Dad’s advice – confronting the fear of public speaking by joining the debating society and putting myself into every public speaking context I could find for myself. No more speech exercises required – and today I take and enjoy every opportunity I have for presenting… and possibly rather too many opportunities to make speeches at friends’ birthdays and the like.

Having appreciated the benefits of my Dad’s training and got the perspective of what it brought me as an adult, I’m wondering how Emily will react if and when we expose her to the same sorts of things when she’s little older. Will she, like we did, look slightly incredulously on at Daddy wondering what this is all about?

Probably, but hopefully she’ll have the fun we did too.