Some of the donations were a bit holy, but I suppose we were in a church

Wednesdays task was at Ealing Road church; not just a place of worship, but a community hub, homeless shelter and food bank (and well known to the gang at Goodgym Hounslow). There were two tasks going on - a Wednesday double whammy. Andy was leading a group litter pick outside, and Tish had organised the indoor tasks, which we were to find out soon.

We waited for everyone to arrive - a few GoodGymmers were reenacting the olden days (who remembers group runs?!) and had a socially distance saunter up from Town Hall. Some of us had made our way to start on time, including a few visitors from up the road in Ealing, and we waited in the cold for the task leads to arrive. Finally, figures appeared from down the road - Ana complete with litter pickers, Michelle who was on a ‘slow’ one, and then the rest. Georgia tutted and looked at her invisible watch ‘you’re late’, as the task force arrived, sweating and panting, ‘three whole minutes’.

Once everyone had caught their breath, we separated into our two tasks (goodbye oh rubbish ones), and were greeted by Roger, from the church. Faces covered and hands sanitised, we entered and were given the jobs for the evening.

First things first, Alanna had to present Emily with her wings. After some 100 good deed related confusion last week (where the gang had celebrated her centurion, when in actual fact it was her 99th), she ended up reaching her 100th on Sunday, so really it was just a fantastic excuse to prolong the party. Angel excuse for more cake eh? Then the actual work got going!

Chris, Jon, Tish, Alanna, Em and Ana went to the main church to help clear the upstairs corridors to make a pathway, and to carrier down bags of old donated clothes, which would need sorting. If only they all had wings, would have saved on all those stairs!

Elsewhere Lucy and Ben were sent to the kitchen to put away the bags of shopping. They made pasta work of stacking the spaghetti and piling the peas into the appropriate cupboards. Roger also had an extra special task for Ben - to put the pots and pans back on top of the cupboards. Such a shelfless thing of Ben to do, and he made short work of it.

After the souper work in the kitchen, Roger got us started on the next job, which was to sort out the old bags of donated clothes. The aim was to try and organise the clothing donations into piles of similar things... So a bag for shirts, one for coats and son on.

The kitchen duo got going on bags, piling up pullovers and pants, stacking scarves and socks. First bag almost emptied... The final items out, and what a pant-i climax, as Ben pulled out a pair of questionable looking underwear. Why oh y-fronts would you donate those?!

Shirtly after that escapade, the rest of the group joined with more bags to clear, and were informed of the organisation systems in place. Before long everything was sorted, and the next job was to bagged them all up, with Alanna on labelling duties to make sure we all knew exactly what was in each one.

We thanked Roger, and agreed we would be back in the near distant future. Some of the group left to get home, and some of us stayed for a car-park based fitness session courtesy of Ana (who wanted to make sure our legs wouldn’t work so we could no longer run away after all those squats and lunges)!