We arrived slightly early for duty on a rainy evening, looking out for the team and hoping our task wasn’t cancelled due to ‘the virus’...

Of course, Sharon greeted us shortly after with a brilliant bunch of volunteers from the church, too. We welcomed Kanchan, who has been involved with the Perry Hall parkrun missions and was new to the food bank task. After a reminder of our hand-washing techniques, we rolled our sleeves up and got going.

We started with a big trolley of all sorts from Birmingham City Council, with some super-organised central weighing stations - Liam and Ben were doing some brilliant lifting, Kanchan was straight to it with the sorting and George took on the brain-busting challenge of heading up the number crunching - whether in kilograms or pounds, he managed work it out!

We then got stuck in with the huge wall of boxes, initially looking a little mysterious behind big black curtains! The contents were anything but foreboding - in fact, HSBC had donated countless boxes of essentials; cereal, soup, pasta, tea, coffee... They thought of all kinds of comforts and staples people might need and included notes with kind words!

We were pleased to hear positive feedback about our helping hands from the church pastor, who popped in briefly. We shortly after pondered our pun for the evening, and being stood next to the mountain of pasta, it was a no-brainier!

Before long we were in the depths of dating (some very impressive ‘speed-dating’ by Liam!), transferring and then stocking the main shelves. The other wall of donations from HSBC will have to wait until next week, but we could certainly head on home after some great team work in the confidence our graft was worthwhile.

Until next time!