Tuesday’s spring-blessed run saw 31 GoodGymmer’s head back to Emmaus (pronounced Em-May-Us!) in Stokes Croft for a bit of lifting and shifting in their enormous furniture warehouse.

Emmaus provides both work and a home for 23 people who were previously homeless. Emmaus’ story is a fascinating one, and we were given a brief history of how they were founded as well as their aims and principles by Xanne when we arrived. If you’ve got a few minutes, you can find out more about their history on the Emmaus website.

Emmaus is a social enterprise and one of their sources of income is selling furniture and other household items that are donated by the public. Their warehouse is crammed to the rafters full of goodies and what they needed was some willing labour to shift things about and help create some Emmaus’ing space.

Any ideas we had of admiring what was in stock were quickly shelved as we embraced our first logistical challenge. With teamwork and brute force, we first cleared some industrial shelving units of their groaning mass, before dismantling them and moving them to another part of the warehouse. Emmaus had set aside a week for just one guy to do the job, we managed to do it in 30 minutes! The rest of the team also took to sorting brick-a-brac and books lifting more pages like an over-excited Harry Potter fanatical octopus in possession of a new JK Rowling novel in an active wind tunnel.

After re-assembling the shelves and making sure they were re-stacked, we took stock of our achievement and we were thanked for a good night’s work.

We then headed off to Queen Square where Gary took us through the usual array of fitness stuff, before deciding then to replenish ourselves with a cool drink. So then, as Shelvis Presley would say, thank you very much!

Thanks to Darren for writing the report and Alice for the pun. Hope you don't mind my little octopus addition, can't miss an opportunity for a simile.