The electric milking machine gave up the ghost halfway through milking Willow

Back in the kitchen I found a puddle of water under the sink where the waste pipe had disconnected (it has happened several times over the past ten years). I had to put it back together again

By now time was against me and I messaged the U3A convener of the monthly writing group to excuse my tardiness. I hadn’t forgotten that the parking machine, adjacent to the Priory Centre where we meet, has a dodgy keypad. The Y refuses to activate so that anyone trying to put in their car registration which contains a Y will be endlessly frustrated. I had prepared a note to put on my dashboard alongside my parking chit showing that I had paid the correct fee. More on this later.

Inside the class we had all written pieces under the title The Gift. It was, as always, a mixed bag. Some made me laugh, some bored me to doodling and several people need to be trained in reading aloud. When our group captain started to read she held a small black pouch in her hand and looked nervously at me saying, “ I don’t usually write true stories and I hope this won’t be triggering when you see what’s in the bag.” Hmmmm. She read the piece about her late Irish mother-in-law who had worked in post war Germany and taken food from the British soldiers’ mess to give to a malnourished German child who appeared outside the kitchen every day. She felt sorry for her especially when she heard that six more children were at home with a sick baby. One day the child’s mother arrived with a gift to thank the kitchen worker for the food which had helped the baby to survive. Three older sons had not returned from the fighting. The woman handed over the following object. Yes it is indeed triggering, chilling and hideous.

https://www.holocaust.org.uk/gold-mothers-cross

I had another story to tell on this subject but decided to let them hear it on another occasion. My own piece about The Gift was true, succinct and contained enough material in 800 words for at least three books! It led two of the group to say, “You’ve led a very interesting life!” Indeed and one only recently scarred by the virulent antisemitism that has been unleashed since October 7th. It has lain shallow and dormant just waiting for an excuse to crawl out from the thin layer of civility with which it has been covered in some of the western world. Elsewhere it has never even tried to hide.

Back to the car park 🅿️where a parking attendant with a Huntingdon logo on her fleece was examining the car next to mine. “Is this your car?” I explained that mine was the one with the hand written note on the dashboard. “Please let the council know that the keypad hasn’t worked properly for over a month.”

“Oh we know that but we don’t bother to repair them because people break them again. Just ignore the Y and go on to the next letter.”

Duh! I was literally dumb-struck. Apparently I won’t get a ticket for typing an incorrect car registration and the machine will likely never be fixed (nor, as she told me, would scores of others). Aaagh!

I managed to get home in one piece which, after the morning I’d had, seemed like a kind of miracle or ………. A gift.