I enjoyed my first session Linda was very helpful and everyone made me feel welcome and relaxed atmosphere I enjoyed packing and moving around to keep fit and exercise. Thank you for the opportunity to support vulnerable families in our communities.

We have missed our AJ at Frenford Food Bank while she has been off marshaling at the Paris Olympics. Our "bits and bobs" shelf had got into much disarray in her absence. Always relishing the chance to create order from disorder she got to work making a big difference in very little time. Welcome back AJ!

Meanwhile Ed got on with sorting and stacking the recent big donation from the local scouts and Linda sorted through a big black bag containing an anonymous donation most of which was years past the BBF date and had to be thrown out. We all know BBF doesn't always mean its gone bad but chocolate from 2020 and milk powder 7 years past its date is really not on 🙄

Restricted funds and storage issues has meant biscuits are no longer on our list and the shelves had to be cleared and cleaned off. Shifting the packets led to much "intellectual" discussion about, best biscuits, boring biscuits, dunking biscuits, the infiltration if the American Orio biscuit and when is a biscuit not a biscuit? To be fair we were in the company of a very helpful 13 year old volunteer so conversation had to be kept light. 😁

Starting with a huge welcome to the Frenford Foodbank team for our new member Gabriella, recruited from our local Parkrun she arrived keen to make a start and was soon picking, packing and generally making herself a very valuable member of the team.

Julia and Kathryn made themselves very useful packing bags and teaming up to shift heavy crates together...although I am not convinced Kathryn giving someone bonus tinned pasta and chocolate mini rolls was a good swap for not having the right sized nappies but it made us laugh.

It was lovely to see Irina again who slipped into the team quietly getting on with things and doing a great job...so quiet I forgot to take her photo, sorry Irena, if its any consolation I also forgot to get a photo of myself 🤦‍♀️

Our regular couple of power packers Herman and Tina proved invaluable as ever completed a very efficient team.

With the steady stream of us arriving at different times and working alongside a couple of Frenfords own volunteers, things ticked over so smoothly we were finished early and had energy to spare to off load a supermarket delivery.

The only hitch was not having initial access to the storage cages so the packages had to be shifted about in crates then lifted on to the cages when the spare store key arrived but no one seemed to mind as we worked together and got the job finished.

The task owner was very pleased and sends a big thank you for our help.

Good job GoodGym. 😁

Well, I was challenged to use the term Tea Bagging in the title - consider it done.

Its always worth putting out a call for help with the midweek shelf filling at Frenford Food Bank as you never know who might have a random day off. Joining regulars Ed and Linda were todays "randoms" Kathryn and Sharon, very helpful they were too. We soon got all the supermarket order and Scouts donations out on the shelves. There was even time to spare to do the little odd jobs of relabeling shelves and decanting big boxes of teabags into smaller portions. All rubbish quickly cleared and spare crates tidied away outside and we were done.

Nice 😊

Three of us arrived at Frenford Food Bank to offload two weeks worth of Scout donations. It was good to see our Helen was available to join us today, she was a great help. Ed took charge of another helper who was the young Son of a Lady in the keep fit class.

The variation in goods that we get in these donations is considerable from a tin of biscuits from Harrods to an opened packet of Walkers Mix Ups where they'd taken their favourites out and sellotaped the bag back down 🙄 Its our job to weed out items like that which are opened and can't be used also the items way beyond their best date e.g. rice pudding from 2015. There are some of us prepared to take stuff that is a little bit past its best date home and replace it with fresh next time we come but 2015 was a bit much even for us 😳 The few oddities we get are far outweighed by the rest of the donations most of which is clearly bought new to give to the foodbank. With two full trolley losds sorted the shelves were considerably fuller than when we started.

Now if I could have just remembered to have taken photos it would have been a job well done🤦‍♀️ So here are some old ones which pretty much demonstrate what we did 😆

First Half - With England in the final it seemed a football reference in the title was appropriate. There was no time to discuss the match as for the first little while there was just the two of us, AJ and Linda, picking and packing at Frenford Foodbank. Whilst we know others will join us as they finish work there is always a niggling "what if it ends up just the two of us" thought as we move about in the eerie quiet of a usually bustling sports centre.

Half Time - A client turned up a little early and their parcel wasn't ready so we scurried about putting that together just as our new member Mira arrived. I hope he realised how welcomed he was as we invited him to throw his stuff on the floor and get stuck in with our rush job. Happy to say there was a little time for the niceties, introductions and brief training later. Mira soon had the hang of it and made a very useful contribution to the session sending a massive welcome to the group Mira.

2nd Half - Herman and Tina arrived straight from work and got started, Herman pointed out that there was a message from James asking if we still needed help so a speedy "get your bum over here" reply was sent. We ended up with 6 Goodgymmers and some Frenford staff, commandeered from their usual jobs by the task owner, so everything got done in good time and there was also a little time at the end of session to do a little shelf filling and the obligatory photo session - AJ had left due to family obligations before then so I have used a cute one from a previous session 😊

Game Over We Won 🥳🥳