Page 1 - BPW-UK - E-news - Edition 120 - March-April 2024

E-news

Edition 120– March - April 2024

Dear Members,

I am writing to you following the successful BPW UK conference 2024 in Bristol. I was
thrilled to welcome not only some of our new members, but also some friends of the local
SEW membership.

This has been the culmination of many hours on Zoom over the last year, and I would like
to repeat my thanks to all the members of this Task Force for sharing the planning process.
I think we would all agree it was worth it!

The Inter-Regional Public Speaking final was excellent, and each of the six teams of young
people spoke eloquently, and with great passion on the chosen topics. I heard a few people
in the audience adding a good-natured “good luck” to the judges, as it was a fantastic
standard again this year. The behind the scenes work to keep this competition is worth it,
the skills gained through the area heats will stay with these people throughout life. After
all, look at two previous participants, Carol Vorderman and Scottish comedian Susan Cal-
man. Susan was the winner back in 1990 and spoke about her winning and being present-
ed with her prize by TV quiz master Bob Holness from the game show “Blockbusters”. She
th
spoke about her experience nearly 35 years later on the BBC’s One Show on 6 March
2024, and if you would like to see the show, please search on the BBC iPlayer, and we are
mentioned around 13 minutes into the interview. This experience is still fondly remembered
and will be by so many of our previous participants. This is just one of the reasons we reg-
istered this as a project with BPW International, as we hope it will inspire other Federations
and Clubs, as well as participants in the future.

We had an incredible young lady, Angelika Sharygina as our guest speaker at the welcome
dinner. The topic was AI or Artificial Intelligence, and after she spoke the room was si-
lenced! Quite a feat at a BPW event! This is such a vast and important topic, which we will
cover more in the coming months. I was very fortunate to be able to present some BPW UK
Membership certificates to some of our very special members. PNP Lynn Everson and Judith
Crowe had hit some wonderful membership milestones, but I cannot possibly say how long
as they both remain fresh-faced.

Our conference day went by too quickly, with wonderful panellists and fascinating subjects,
but you will hear more about this later in the Newsletter. On the final day of our conference
weekend, we visited the Aerospace Museum which was just a short distance away from our
hotel. Filton has the last Concorde to be built and indeed also the last to be flown. The mu-
seum offered us a private tour of the aircraft, with just one of the highlights being able to
walk through the aircraft’s cabin to get a flavour of how those passengers got to a destina-
tion in just a fraction of the time of contemporary normal commercial aircraft.

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