Our presents was required at Bentalls to help the Kingston Hospital Charity

After the most detailed scavenger hunt instructions to locate the stand items and set them up correctly, we were rendered cognitively useless. It really took it out of us. This was very clear to see by all the shoppers walking through Bentalls this afternoon.

Now, the task was to sell raffle tickets to raise money for the Kingston Hospital Charity, with prizes of shopping vouchers up for grabs - and we were also promoting the present wrapping to raise money too. For the most part, this message was conveyed. But at times, shoppers may have been bombarded with calls for:

• "Tickets for Kingston Hospital”.
• "Wrapping tickets”.
• “Raffle tickets for Christmas”.
• "Win a flea shopping spree”.
• “Raffle tickets for shopping trees”.
• "Win a shopping spree at Kingston Hospital".

Safe to say that our words were getting a bit bent (all) out of shape from all of our promoting support for Kingston Hospital!

And shoppers were also met with us collapsing in laughter as we realised that we were making no sense. Note to self: this is a highly effective marketing strategy and we were kept very very busy indeed, with lots of donations, raffle ticket buying and queues for present wrapping. We even had an audience of a staff member from a certain shop laughing away whilst watching us.

We (Kate) also stepped up (quite literally - to the first floor) to give another volunteer a break and took on the lead with the Christmas tree decoration making stall. She also valiantly attempted to help wrap presents whilst the present wrapper was on a break, only to learn that we were not allowed to be left with the scissors and they had been taken on the break too. Possibly very wise not to trust us with scissors after our non-sensical (at times) promoting!

The globe (or glob, as the instructions email stated) was looking significantly healthier when we left - elf-identally we had managed to raise quite a heap of notes for the Kingston Hospital Charity. And had a HUGE amount of fun doing so. Thank you for a wonderful mission team, it was a massive blast!