Busy day at the Soup Kitchen. Jacquie was in the kitchen all day(2 shifts), Nishy was on tea duties. Lunch was chicken, mashed potatoes and vegetables or vegetarian sausages with potatoes and vegetables. Dessert was cake and other custard. Meal was much appreciated by the clients.

GoodGym Ealing's traditional Xmas get together was in a new location for 2024, The Grove, where we had a cosy corner set aside for us. We also had crackers, of course, where we found jokes, paper hats and lots of wooden spoons. Were the spoons a booby prize or useful cutlery? Well, opinions varied.

After a very energetic task at St Mary's church decorating their Xmas tree and preparing the first floor for their bumper Christmas congregation, it was time to treat ourselves to some food and drink. It was the most recent of many good deeds that GoodGym Ealing have completed in 2024, so we felt like we'd all earned it while we reflected on 2024. There was also the traditional GoodGym quiz to get people to recall useful/useless facts from the past year, which was a bit more challenging than usual this time.

Steph mysteriously vanished when Santa appeared. Maybe he suffers from clausophobia? In any case, Santa was kind enough to run our Secret Santa gift exchange to give wonderful £5-or-under gifts like a dog quiz, a box of Lindor chocolates or a mo-tea-vational mug.

We all had a great evening and went home full of festive cheer or festive beer, or both.

A unit of five elite elves entered the William Hobbayne Centre at 1 pm on Sunday to transform the community space into an indoor Christmas market venue for artisans from Hanwell and Ealing. The first stage of operations was all about unpacking goodies from cars, moving chairs and generally relocating various items: from mulled wine bottles to beer bottles. And let's not forget about the hot chocolate! The upcoming festive crafts fair was going to be properly merry!

The team was blocked from setting up the tables for the stall holders until 2 pm because of a taekwondo class in the main hall. Instead, they helped with the set-up in the backroom, where one of our GoodGymers, Milly, today visited the Hobbayne Centre as one of the local craftspeople. Lena has shown unwavering patience, untangling a cable of Christmas lights and then braving the weather to embellish a rail outside the centre despite gusts of wind and rain. Her festive decoration must have grabbed the public's attention as later the event had a good, steady stream of visitors.

Five minutes to 2 pm the event organiser, Siena, gathered the crew and briefed them about the plan of action. The elves were to take over the taekwondo training space, move the chairs out, bring the tables in and unfold them as soon as possible so that the local crafters could start preparing their stalls.

With the main hall maneuvres completed quickly, the elves moved to the kitchen and started getting tipsy (I mean busy!) preparing the beverages. Steph Ducat and Paul heated the mulled wine and did careful quality checks that revealed that the drink was warming and excellent in taste. Nishy and Lena took on a more advanced task of preparing hot chocolate in a Heinz-branded soup warmer. The team trusted Nishy's (who is a talented baker) skills to figure out the proportions of milk and chocolate powder. The process required a lot of stirring, which Lena, again, did with compelling persistence. Kash came in at the end to give the concoction a more energetic stir. The chocolate drink turned out smooth and tasty, but it had nothing to do with "hot". June, the task owner, suggested heating it up in a saucepan and then pouring the batch back into the soup warmer to keep it at the right temperature. The trick worked like magic and concluded the preparations, shortly before the arrival of the firsts visitors. Check out what happened next!

It was a first and a last for an Ealing Repair Cafe x GoodGym Ealing collab. All 5 GoodGymers arrived on time for the first time! Early, even. On the other hand, this would be their last session of 2024 together. 3 of the today's stitchers ran from Ealing Broadway, while Nishy and Gabriela, who was at her first GoodGym session met the runners at the Doughnut Factory. Welcome to GoodGym, Gabriela! 🎉

Task owner Mary was glad to see them

"Great, you can help with the backlog!"- Mary

There was indeed a backlog, with 2 tasks to get started with. Each would produce items from reused materials for Age UK to donate to those in need.

The threaders, Nishy, Kash and Mohamed, had a pile of drawstring bags that had been sewn from waste t-shirts. The only problem was that they hadn't had their drawstring inserted yet, so they were only "bags", waiting to achieve their drawstring potential. The threaders used the secret skill, passed down through generations of Ealing Repair Cafe volunteers, to add the ties to the channels at the top of the bags, speeding through 16 of them.

Meanwhile the stuffers, Gabriela and Sevan, were working to make draught excluders to stop the cold wind from blowing under the recipients' front doors. The casing had been made with old jean legs and the GoodGymers were filling those casings with wadding and scraps of waste fabric. There were lots of different techniques to get the filling evenly distributed, including swinging the draught excluder around their heads.

Eventually, everyone moved on to draught excluder production, with each of them learning something new. Mohamed took control of a sewing machine for the first time to turn fabric into casings. Everyone else learned that running stitches wouldn't seal the open end of the draught excluders securely, so instead they needed a back stitch to strengthen the closure. No more sewing while running then 🙄

In all, the team had 16 fully completed bags and 7 draught excluders which will help the elderly in Ealing borough keep warm this winter.

Friday Hub and the Goodgymteers joined forces for the early shift at the Crypt. 5 regulars present today helping in different areas from unloading the deliveries, serving tea and biscuits, sorting the clothes, preparing grocery bags, preparing the service/dining area and cooking lovely food in the kitchen. Busy first shift but all ready for the customers to come in and have food and other items/activities at the Crypt.