(This is my first ever blog post thing – bear with me – I’ll get the hang of it soon – jon)

What caught my eye was the simple fact that here was the best invention ever. Absolutely genius. My mind could not begin to comprehend how insanely clever it was. You just press a button and instantly, near boiling water comes out. Not pre-boiled. Not from some urn that’s constantly on and ready and waiting – but a small see-through counter top machine to sit in your kitchen and you stick cold water in the water reservoir thing and then, and then whenever you feel like it you just press the button and instant hot water comes out (you could also press a different button and chilled water came out – not quite as clever but still pretty cool). And it cost about £35 so I bought it.
That was 11 years ago, or, in the language of “broken-stuff-we-take-with-us-from-one-garage-to-a-new-garage” terms, two moves ago. Because after about 3 months of working brilliantly it didn’t anymore. Didn’t get quite as hot and didn’t get quite as cold. (See Revelation 3:16 to see what God would have done to it at that point!)
Rather than do what God would have done with it at that point, I did what I always do with things like that when they stop working. I stuck it in the garage. Is there ever a more pointless thing to do? I don’t know why I did it; why I always do it. I was never going to fix it. If I take the cover off something electrical I normally start to rock backwards and forwards and cry. I feel that as a man I’m meant to sort of instinctively know what to do with electrical things but all I can do is blow fluff away if there seems to be a build up of fluff on something wirey and/or take batteries out and give them a good shake and reinsert them. So I was never going to actually get round to mend it. And I wasn’t going to return it to the manufacturers because I hadn’t kept the receipt and so, maybe I was thinking that someday it would miraculously heal itself and equally miraculously let me know that it had. But to take the other option of “throw it away”? No chance. We don’t do that in my family. My dad would “make do and mend”: I merely hide it and hope.
So when we moved from Chester to Sale, it was one of the many items that went from sitting broken in one garage to sitting broken in a new garage. And when we moved from Sale to Astbury it found itself in a much larger garage so that many more wounded and dying items could be lined up alongside it. In the third largest room in the garage (you would not believe how big our so called garage is….) it looks a bit like the hospital tent on the battlefield of some electrical goods Armageddon. The last great battle between the Appliances of Too Cheap who had been fighting an elite force of Short, Sweet, Warranty Warriors.
Field Marshall Filter sat, broken, next to Captain Coffee Maker and Private Pancake-Grill. Two unfortunate members of the S A Espresso corps lay side by side: one with his internal workings spilling out over the worktop. A car vacuum with a loose wire had tried to valiantly solder on.
Three once proud petrol strimmers, each standing over 6 feet tall now leaned against the wall for support, their arms spread, hopeful for an embrace – each one of them, just like their off switches, terminally depressed.
Major Appliance, once stentorian, now still, silent. Calvin the crazy can-opener: unpredictable – more than one screw loose.
And as the Owner walked among them – seeing his once proud troops now pathetic, broken, dazed and fused they looked up at him and, as one, seemed to say: “Why not end the suffering? Why do you leave us here?
Henry the Hoover looked up at him with his one remaining eye – the other caved in when a sledgehammer had somehow slipped and had he been able to speak would surely have said STOP hoarding stuff. Stop keeping things that have no use.
And Henry’s red, breaking voice bled across the scene: whispering a single word which sounded as a clarion call of hope. Repeated and re-echoed around – picked up by two other broken, yet hoarded appliances, then four, and on and on until from every corner the chant rose – a single voice had become a chorus: “Re-cycle. Re-cycle!”
The Owner did the next best thing. Not the bravest thing. Not the cleverest thing. Not really a very caring thing considering it was him who had caused most of their injuries.

He ordered a skip.