The first group run after the clocks went forward last weekend was all in bright daylight. What a difference it made! Steph Ducat, Sevan and Kash ran from Ealing Broadway to Acton to meet Mary and Lone from Ealing Repair Cafe in a new workshop location - the Hall of St Mary's Church.

Chris did not join the runners today as he was doing some proper lifting! He made his way to the task by doing the exercise called farmer's walk - or shall we say a donor's walk? Chris showed up with a ton of bags of used clothes that were ready to be reborn as something else! Well done Chris! Ealing Repair Cafe is all about reusing, repairing or recycling old fabrics.

Mary and Lone did a triage on the spot:

• Clothes in good condition to be donated to the refugees
• Old Liverpool and England football t-shirts to be transformed into the famous drawstring bags
• Trainers - to be donated somewhere else (two GoodGymers declared to run back with them and send the shoes to JogOn)
• Jeans to be upcycled into tote bags
• Socks, shorts and particularly ripped clothes to be cut into scraps to make stuffing for draught excluders

"Those are proper jeans, we can make bags out of them! Traid usually give us those skinny jeans, and they are good mostly for draught excluders" - Mary

Ealing Repair Cafe recently donated a couple of draught excluders to St Mary's Church in Acton, which served well to secure the drafty north church door. Who knows, maybe that has also secured us a venue for today's workshop!

Chris spent the rest of the session cutting his old apparel into shreds. He did not expect that turn of events when contributing his old stuff but was extremely grateful that Ealing Repair Cafe accepted his donation. That made Chris immediately stuck into the task.

Steph, Kash and Lone were making t-shirt drawstring bags from already sewn material and by the end of the task completed all 30 that had been prepared. Ealing Repair Cafe donated their last bags batch to The Store Cupboard in West Ealing - a not-for-profit shop providing affordable food to people referred by agencies and charities. We should soon find out which charity receives our latest creations.

Sevan got stuck into detailed work of tracing the letters for Act for Ealing banner, then cut them out. That provided us with some good entertainment: making anagrams! Cleft Granola? Teal Frog Clan? Is that a good band name?

We partner with Act for Ealing as a green travel and exercise group and occasionally share our upcoming activities with them. Check out their news - you can find a lot of fantastic events with an environmental theme if you ever get bored with GoodGym. Hopefully you won't as we have an exciting event planned for this Saturday in collaboration with WWF - check it out here!

There was already a big queue of people outside South Ealing Community Food Cupboard at 10:30am, 2 and a half hours before the doors opened to the public. Going inside, Sevan found that one of the regular clients had made banana bread, which was being shared around the volunteers, including Martin, Eliz and Sevan. The banana bread was a vision of what was to come.

When the delivery van arrived, Sevan was in the sun, carting crates of food to the church building and handing them over to Martin, who'd find the right spot to place them to be unpacked later. Eliz was busy organising the food donations, especially trying to stack the fridges in a sensible way to make everything fit and still have the food be easily accessible.

The shelves and fridges were stacked speedily and ready for service by 11:30. There were big deliveries of bananas, bread and mushrooms for the clients to help themselves to and banana bread is probably on the menu again for the volunteers next week 😋.

Welcome to the annual transformation from Night Shelter to B&B. The tasks included painting, cleaning, shifting things and eating left over food.

The cleaning was mainly of the bathrooms and what an amazing job was done! Painting was continuing the excellent job done on Thursday with roller and brush. Shifting? Well how do you fancy moving a tumble dryer? You do? Excellent! Finally the eating. All I can say is 😋 Well done everyone. I’ve eaten my ice cream I got on the way home so this is the end of the report!

Until next time…

As Ms L is now finding it harder to walk to the shops, she'd asked GoodGym to help get some essential groceries. Sevan arrived a few minutes early and while he was waiting, an ambulance drove along the street.

"Is that 🤐 building?" - Paramedic
"Yep" - Sevan

When mission time arrived, Sevan buzzed the intercom.

"If that door opens, can you hold it for me?" - Paramedic
"Sure" - Sevan
"I'm going to number 🤐" - Paramedic

Wait... that's where Sevan was going too! He hoped that Ms L was OK. Sevan let the paramedic go first as his call was probably higher priority than shopping for some ham slices.

When the paramedic got to Ms L's place, Ms L and her housemate were surprised. They hadn't phoned for help or pulled any emergency cords. The only help that they were expecting was from GoodGym, so the paramedic left, happy that no one was in need of care.

Once Sevan became the focus, Ms L explained why she now had difficulty going to the shops and handed Sevan an envelope with a shopping list and £25. There was a lot of creamy goodness on the list. Butter, cheese, single cream and condensed milk all needed an emergency top up.

Sevan set off for Sainsburys, finding the paramedic still parked outside. No doubt he had lots of admin to complete for the call out that wasn't 🙁.

Shopping was quick and easy, with everything found and delivered to Ms L in 30 minutes. Sevan was please to see that the ambulance had finally left, hopefully onto a more serious case.