Category: Announcements

Our next monthly meeting is on Wednesday, 10th July, and I look forward to seeing as many of you there as possible.
Please ensure that you enter the building from the car park rear entrance.

The good weather is among us, nice to see the sunshine after the cold winter and wet spring. A time for getting out and, if you are able, getting away on your holidays, short breaks or days out. Really hoping that the current airport delays and flight cancellations – more to come – do not affect any of us.

Don’t forget there are plenty of wonderful places in the UK to visit, I personally love the Scottish Highland, Snowdonia in Wales and love a long weekend close to home in the Peak District, we really are blessed with a wonderful choice.

Our guest speaker this month is a gentleman known as Andy McKinnon, who will be giving us a talk on the First World War, a topic that is no longer within living memory unless you are over 104 years old.

Following on from our coffee / tea break we will be hearing from Home-Start a charity that supports families with young children, run by local trained volunteers.

Looking forward to the both of the talks, and a big thankyou as always to Dianne our Speakers Secretary for arranging everything.

Our Treasurer will be back among us in the near future and the bank mandate resolved, so financial activity will soon be back to normal, thanks for your patience during this handover period from our ex-Treasurer Christine to our new Treasurer, Gary.

On our website, www.hucknallu3a.org.uk under the heading ‘Announcements’ there is a list of all of the groups that have vacancies and are looking for new members. However, should you want to join a group that is full, please speak to the group’s co-ordinator and/or Sue Tedstone who will be only too glad to give help and encouragement in helping you to start a new group. Hopefully when our current group leaders tell us what it is they do, it will encourage more of us to take a more active part.

Please approach any of the committee or indeed anyone, who will gladly lead you in the right direction.

As always, thanks to Steve for preparing and editing our newsletter, we are very lucky, not many u3as have monthly newsletters.

Melvyn Francis, Chair

Safety
As always, Covid is still amongst us with the latest ‘Omicron’ variants and quite a few among us are still catching it. If you have any of the symptoms, high temperature, persistent cough, loss of sense of taste and smell, sore throat or cold-like symptoms, please do not attend the monthly meetings or indeed any group meetings / activities.
We will be keeping all of the windows open, so please dress accordingly. If you feel more comfortable wearing a mask, please do so.

As always, please use the rear doors off the car park for access and ensure that you register yourself as attending. If leaving before the end of the meeting, it is important for health and safety reasons that you sign yourselves out.

Our meeting will start as normal at 2.00 pm, with a few announcements, followed by our guest speaker, Andy McKinnon, talking to us about the 1st World War.

After our coffee / tea break, we will be reconvening to hear a short talk from ‘Home-Start’.
Home-Start is a local community network of trained volunteers and expert support helping families with young children through their challenging times. They are there for parents when they need them the most because childhood can’t wait.

Unfortunately, we will always be plagued with swindlers, fraudsters and scammers who are only too keen to relieve us of our well-earned cash. They also have absolutely no conscience and are more than happy to target the elderly.

Fake “Evri” delivery text scam
Delivery company “Evri”, formerly Hermes, is being impersonated by fraudsters ask-ing for bank details to pay a fake delivery fee. It asks the recipient to visit a website to pay a £1.45 shipping fee, and if they don’t pay, the parcel will be returned to the sender.

Phoney BT direct debit email
BT is being impersonated by scammers in an email that asks you to change your di-rect debit details.
As fraudulent emails go, this is a convincing one. It includes BT’s branding, logo and even BT’s customer service phone number. But the link behind the button directs you to a fake website. If you receive a message out of the blue about payment details, please always check with your provider directly before you click.

Fake Energy Bill Rebate Scheme
It’s not taken long for scammers to jump on the back of soaring energy bills. Emails using the logo of the energy regulator Ofgem claim to offer an ‘energy bill rebate scheme’ worth up to £450 per household. The email gives a link to click on which directs you to a fake online portal where victims are urged to share personal and payment details in order to claim their refund.
As always do not open the link and give no details

Santander Impersonation Scheme
Most of us receive dodgy texts but it’s nice to know the latest one doing the round.
This scam begins with what appears to be a warning text from Santander about so-called suspicious activity on your account. The warning is then meant to lure you into clicking a URL to notify Santander it wasn’t you.
As always, ignore and delete without opening any links

Never give your bank details to anyone you don’t know or do not trust and never give your bank card PIN number to anyone you don’t trust implicitly. Likewise, your PIN number should never be written down. When drawing cash out of an ATM then always cover your hand as you enter your PIN number.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the founding of the u3a organisation in the UK and The Notts u3a Network are planning a week of events from Saturday, 18th to Saturday, 24th September 2022 and are looking for participants.

The week’s activities have still to be discussed at our committee stage to see how we will be joining in. However, Notts Network organisers want to know if anybody is interested in taking part in the main event on Saturday, 24th September.

On Saturday 24th there will be a Grand Finale in the Market Square in Nottingham. This will include a flash mob, local celebrities and the final arrival of the beacons. The Flash Mob will be a general gathering of u3a members, initially just hanging about the Square and at a signal, they will all join together and perform a Square Dance or something similar, depending on the number of participants.

There would be a couple of lessons to train for the dance prior to the event.

If you are interested as a single person, a couple or a group please let me know. At present we have a few names, about ten, but could do with more. I have registered our interest with the organisers and await further details.

Melvyn,
Chairman

Please click on the link below to see our wide range of interest groups which have vacancies and would love to hear from you

Interest Groups