Cut the Scrap

On an unseasonably warm November evening 25 adventure-seeking runners met in Bristol to run a 3 mile round trip to the Children’s Scrapstore in St Werburghs to help them to work through a backlog of scrap sorting jobs.

After meeting at Vivo on the Welsh Back and doing a few farmyard related warm ups we headed off through the brizzle drizzle to our task. Being a large group meant that a few of us got caught at the traffic lights once or twice but this did not mean waiting in the cold, oh no, to keep warm the troops performed press ups, star jumps, and squats.

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the warehouse of wonder. The Scrapstore is an amazing place that takes waste from a wide range of businesses including telecoms companies, breweries and suitcase manufacturers, and turns them into useful items for children to use for arts and crafts, games and whatever else they can think of. After the unwanted items arrive at the Scrapstore they sometimes need to be processed to become useful. That was our task for the evening. The wonderful Kelly and her team had set up various stations for us to get to work cutting nets, burning through ropes, dismantling carpet samples and so much more. Everyone went right to work and stuck at it for a full 25 minutes. Richard was our cloth cutter extraordinaire, Ivo, our guest from London for the evening, took full charge of the heated cuttery thing, and Rachel was boss blade when it came to cutting thread from bobbins. After a lot of scraptivity our time was up, and we had achieved loads. After a cheeky floppy hat group photo we bid adieu to one of our favourite projects and ran on back to Queen Square.

There was still time left for a couple of laps of the square with some sprints to get the blood rushing before we stretched out and called it a night.

Thanks to everyone who came along, I had a great time and hope you did too. Remember there is a social at Kongs of King Street on Thursday from 6:30pm.

Gary