I ran to the city centre for my first community mission with TAWS at Aston University. It felt right to get out eventually after setting up so many of them from home, although the weather suggested I should have possibly stayed at home on the computer.

I had a brief welcome to show me the different areas where food was being checked, before I was introduced to the track. This is a one way system where volunteer sorters bring boxes of food from the loading room for packers (this was my job today) to put in the bags in their trolley. It was a transfixing carousel of food, like a subdued Supermarket Sweep. I wasn’t quite going wild in the aisles, but I did have Rylan Clark-Neal’s voice in my head, but that might be due to my 8 year old daughter’s obsession with him; we really are watching too much Rylan in lockdown!

So I started doing laps, putting 5 bags in my trolley at a time and filling them each with some Rice, Pasta, Tuna, Baked Beans, Chopped Tomatoes among various other staples. We did also pack a coffee drink called Nitro, because it has added Nitrogen, which is probably the last thing you need with coffee but...

Soon enough Louise and Becky arrived and joined in with the laps of the food tables. Louise was completing her 10th good deed today and it was great to see her again, after doing many Foodbank community missions together. Go and give her a cheer to celebrate this milestone. Both of them had been to the task when it was in Ladywood, so they knew the drill but they just had to get used to a new environment.

The most scarce commodity in the building all afternoon seemed to be trolleys. At this point I was asked to lend mine to one of the volunteer drivers who was trying to load up his car with food bags. I happily did, and tried to stay busy opening up boxes of food for the other packers carrying on, but there wasn’t much of this to open thanks to the amount of volunteers helping. So I was glad to see Tousif as he came in to take out deliveries. We had a little chat about how we were both doing before we were rather rudely pulled up for talking by one of the other packers, which wasn’t really representative of the good natured welcome I had at this task.

For the rest of the task, Becky and Louise went upstairs to chop and bag up large vegetables so we could add some fresh food into the bags. Before I knew it, they were back downstairs to say goodbye and I was soon off myself, running home in much more pleasant weather.