A team of six GoodGymmers from five West London boroughs joined hands (not literally, one meter plus rule and social distancing put a stop to that, don’t worry Boris) to help out a local TRAID store.

TRAID are a charity that help to tackle the negative environmental effects of making, consuming and disposing of clothes, and try and promote sustainable fashion. There are stores across the capital, and tonight’s task took place at the Hammersmith & Fulham branch.

We were greeted by Marcos and Jade, who explained they were changing the whole store’s stock, and they rail-ly needed our help to get the job done. They had masked for our help to empty the rows of clothes and make sure the hangers were out of the way. Then the hangers needed sorting into the right boxes, and the clothes needed to be loaded into cages and bags.

The task maskers/mask masters got to work. Monika and Marieke were ‘hanging’ out in the back corner, taking tees and shifting shirts; and Michelle was on shoe-ty (shoe duty, get it?!) making sure that’s the pumps had pairs and the trainers were in two before bagging the boots and brogues up. Meanwhile, Ella & Ben were doing tee-riffic work emptying racks, making culottes of piles of clothes to be racked away, and Lucy had a jean-ius way of super efficiently getting trousers and skirts off the clip hangers. Ella cottoned on to the double handed unclipping technique with great satisfaction and made shorts work of the rail she was clearing off.

We worked our way down the shop, and before we knew it the rails were undressed, and it was about tidying up the ‘dress’ we had made. Hangers needed to be stacked in boxes, and when we had ran out of them, into bags. Then the clothes scattering the floor needed loading into cages, which Michelle and Monika took turns in sort of prodding and poking down into the cages with a long stick. Vegetable soup or vest-able soup? The offers today are tee and mint, or carrot and coat-iander.

The cages were filled, so we jumper-ed onto filling blue bags with the remaining piles of clothes. A quick game of that well known classic ‘who can push the boxes of coat hangers fastest across the floor’ and a little tie-dy up and rubbish collect by Marieke, we were done.

Six good deeds racked up - ‘top’ work from everyone.