The first group run after the clocks went forward last weekend was all in bright daylight. What a difference it made! Steph Ducat, Sevan and Kash ran from Ealing Broadway to Acton to meet Mary and Lone from Ealing Repair Cafe in a new workshop location - the Hall of St Mary's Church.

Chris did not join the runners today as he was doing some proper lifting! He made his way to the task by doing the exercise called farmer's walk - or shall we say a donor's walk? Chris showed up with a ton of bags of used clothes that were ready to be reborn as something else! Well done Chris! Ealing Repair Cafe is all about reusing, repairing or recycling old fabrics.

Mary and Lone did a triage on the spot:

• Clothes in good condition to be donated to the refugees
• Old Liverpool and England football t-shirts to be transformed into the famous drawstring bags
• Trainers - to be donated somewhere else (two GoodGymers declared to run back with them and send the shoes to JogOn)
• Jeans to be upcycled into tote bags
• Socks, shorts and particularly ripped clothes to be cut into scraps to make stuffing for draught excluders

"Those are proper jeans, we can make bags out of them! Traid usually give us those skinny jeans, and they are good mostly for draught excluders" - Mary

Ealing Repair Cafe recently donated a couple of draught excluders to St Mary's Church in Acton, which served well to secure the drafty north church door. Who knows, maybe that has also secured us a venue for today's workshop!

Chris spent the rest of the session cutting his old apparel into shreds. He did not expect that turn of events when contributing his old stuff but was extremely grateful that Ealing Repair Cafe accepted his donation. That made Chris immediately stuck into the task.

Steph, Kash and Lone were making t-shirt drawstring bags from already sewn material and by the end of the task completed all 30 that had been prepared. Ealing Repair Cafe donated their last bags batch to The Store Cupboard in West Ealing - a not-for-profit shop providing affordable food to people referred by agencies and charities. We should soon find out which charity receives our latest creations.

Sevan got stuck into detailed work of tracing the letters for Act for Ealing banner, then cut them out. That provided us with some good entertainment: making anagrams! Cleft Granola? Teal Frog Clan? Is that a good band name?

We partner with Act for Ealing as a green travel and exercise group and occasionally share our upcoming activities with them. Check out their news - you can find a lot of fantastic events with an environmental theme if you ever get bored with GoodGym. Hopefully you won't as we have an exciting event planned for this Saturday in collaboration with WWF - check it out here!

Begining of the month and when i went to the supermarket before our evening group run, noticed that the "Donate Food" box was empty!! So got a few items to start getting the box full. Hopefully it will go "spiral"

Litter everywhere and goodgymers ready to action during the month to tidy up. Who you gonna call? Goodgymers!!!!Goodgym at its best - great job with litter picking again this month in the borough

There was already a big queue of people outside South Ealing Community Food Cupboard at 10:30am, 2 and a half hours before the doors opened to the public. Going inside, Sevan found that one of the regular clients had made banana bread, which was being shared around the volunteers, including Martin, Eliz and Sevan. The banana bread was a vision of what was to come.

When the delivery van arrived, Sevan was in the sun, carting crates of food to the church building and handing them over to Martin, who'd find the right spot to place them to be unpacked later. Eliz was busy organising the food donations, especially trying to stack the fridges in a sensible way to make everything fit and still have the food be easily accessible.

The shelves and fridges were stacked speedily and ready for service by 11:30. There were big deliveries of bananas, bread and mushrooms for the clients to help themselves to and banana bread is probably on the menu again for the volunteers next week 😋.

I hadn’t bean to see Mr G in a while, but I was off on a Friday night mission to get his shopping in. Mr G had been struggling a bit of late and was glad for the company and someone to chat to more than anything! With his usual booklet of items to hand, I headed round to Sainsburys to fill my basket with his goods before getting back for another chat, and hopefully he will be o-kale.

Sunday and the clocks went forward. Sunny afternoon and Steph joined Gurpal and Adel at Bixley Field allotment. What was going to move forward at the allotments? As only 3 volunteers in total, there where 2 tasks in mind. It was filling the vegetable beds with soil etc or preparing the plot for a new polytunnel!!! Goodgym are getting used to doing polytunnels!!!It was decided that it was poly o'clock!!! We had to even the ground and do trenches all around the location of the new polytunnel that would be 6 X 3 meters. Measurements taken and location defined, it was time to dig the soil, remove all plastic or other items and separate the soil from any vegetation. We found loads of plastic, cellotape, card board and potatoes(even purple ones) from last years plantation. The grass and weed taken out, the ground was leveled and a trench appeared around the battered area. It was time to clean the tools and get hydrated as sunny. Next phase will be to set the polytunnel up, but as least the ground is ready for action.