Feed the birds (do they know it's Christmas time?)

Today we headed up to Bath City Farm to help out at their Christmas Fair.

Amongst the other attractions, our mission for the day was to run a stall making bird feeders.

We had two type of bird feeders to make. One came in the form of a couple of tubs of popcorn, which was to be threaded onto strings. The other was a big bag of bird seed and a box of suet, which needed to be mixed together and stuffed into hemispheres of orange peel.

Once constructed, the kids attending the Fair were invited to take them and hang them from the farm's trees.Our job was to run the construction production line.

First problem - we were right out of oranges. When I arrived, Alice and Jane had already filled the four halves of oranges they already had, so my first job having walked up the big hill to the farm, was to head back down the big hill to pop to Lidl and buy a couple of kilos of oranges...

I returned bearing armfulls of fresh oranges, like some crazy Nell Gwyn fanboy. By now the others had arrived, so a couple of us headed into the on-site kitchen to chop all hull the oranges. Nothing was going to go to waste - they have a few dozen goats on site, not to mention the biggest pig you'll ever see, who get through an awful lot of food between them.

By now Laura and Meyrick were running a sewing-bee, sewing popcorns onto thread, while Jane was getting her hands firmly into the seedy suet mix - this being clearly, totally her forte.

Alice milti-tasked - helping out in the kitchen, and then marshalling the back end of the enormous queue of people waiting to see Santa!

Eventually we ran out of oranges and string, even though there was still tons of food left - so Jane fashioned a few suet balls and we called it a day.

Not your average mission for GoodGym, if there is such a thing. But a fun and worthwhile day out.