Reading Branch meeting 31st January 2019  Speaker: Mike Swaddling  Mike, a retired marketing communications manager living in Sandhurst, after full time work, he was able to follow up an idea inspired by his father's memoirs to help retired people with their reminiscences. Over 10 years, he visited retirement homes and recorded first-hand stories of lives of five hundred people stretching back almost 100 years. These were compiled into ten or twelve anthologies. The stories are as varied as human nature itself, and his talk brought a handful of them to life in an entertaining fashion and with lots of humour. He also shared some of the techniques he learned on how to get people to talk about their past lives. Firstly, one needs to have the background, then a technique, and finally anecdotes. There is no such thing as an ordinary life. His father’s life story up to 1997 would not be considered “P.C.” today but times were different. He developed a “talking…