For All In'Tents' And Purposes

This evening we were hoping to be joined by a new person... but it was not to be on this occasion; plenty more opportunities in the future though. We also had a new task to assist with tonight, helping the BCDP deliver hot drinks and food to rough sleepers around Barnsley. After gathering at Glasshouse our group galavanted gleefully towards the new meeting site. We arrived at around 7, but there was no-one to meet us!! After a quick phone call to Peter, within which it was discovered that there had been some rather crossed wires regarding meeting times, he was on his way to meet us. There was a key safe to gain access but Kirsty couldn't remember the combination off the top of her head, we later found out that it was a special Birthday (not wanting to give too much away!). Whilst waiting for Peter to arrive and save the day we did our fitness session early to keep us warm and make good use of the time. The session this week was a squat challenge to the tune of, the always popular, Bring Sally Up! We made it through the song and were much warmer upon it's completion, getting us nicely prepped for our upcoming delivery runs.

When Peter arrived we headed into the lock-up to make the sandwiches, prepare the bags, and fill the flasks. We informed Peter about a couple of people begging in the stairwell of glasshouse, who we'd encountered on our run, so he could check on them. Kirsty was on-duty filling the bags with their base components (2 bags of crisps of different varieties, a chocolate bar, a juice box... and a possible croissant? I'm not sure of the exact contents). James and Daniel were in charge of sandwiches. James was buttering up some slices of bread (a change from the normal buttering up of people) and Daniel was the final piece in the production line puzzle, adding the cheese then bagging them up and adding them to the contents of the larger plastic bags. We also made a flask of tea and sourced some paper cups to take with us. Next we borrowed some rucksacks from the center to aide us on our mission to deliver the snack bags and tea.

We were glad to be of assist-tents - Kirsty

When we were all kitted out we found out our target areas from Peter and planned a basic route. Our first destination was the old leaning tower of pizza(hut) on Dryden Rd. We didn't find anyone here but did find evidence of rough sleeping behind some corrugated iron leaning up against the Pizza Hut wall. Whilst in the area we did a quick round of the business park to check if there was anyone near one of the shop entrances, but we found no-one. We did find a tent in the carpark which we 'tentatively' checked to determine whether it was currently occupied. It wasn't, but it was clearly being lived in so we left a bag of food in the doorway for whomever is staying there to come back to. We're glad to be of assis'tents' in any way we can! Next we headed for the shipping containers on some wasteland; here we didn't find anyone either, but again there were signs of habitation. Our final place place to check was the churchyard. We split up and circled it in opposite directions but no-one was found. We didn't have to 'canvas' much tonight, but we did get some friendly words from the occasional passing pedestrian. Time up, we headed back to Hope House to report our findings and drop off all of the food for future use. Peter is going to check on the locations where we found signs of rough sleeping at a later time, so our run was of use even though we didn't distribute anything.

All that was left to do was run back up to Glasshouse to stretch off, which is very much needed after running 5km up and down Barnsley's hills (that is 'tent-amount' to HIIT). We stretched hamstrings, quads, calves, hips, lower back, forearms, triceps, IT band and a more intensive calf stretch on a step.