Romance is in the air. February is the month of romance with Valentin's day. Romance is not dead and Goodgymers have not fallen out with litter and have proved once again this month by going out with their hearts and collected litter like cans, bottles, crisp and sweet wrappers, cigarette butt's, various plastic items, lost trainers, umbrellas and larger ones like sofas etc which some of them had to left behind and reported to the local services. There were some flirty pickup lines noted. All the lovely litter will find its way to its home like a recycling bin where it belongs and not in the streets or in the parks.

Today's Care4Calais session saw the 2-2 theme from the earlier Pitshanger Junior parkrun continue, with the team's skirts staying on through this session too. There was no other fancy dress on display as the start of the task was all business.

Boxes of school uniforms had arrived at C4C's West London base and the first task was to sort through them, getting rid of anything that was damaged or poor quality. Next, the clothes were organised by size. Instead of the child's age, which GoodGymers had used for previous school uniform tasks, the key today was the waist size as most donations were trousers. Some pairs were brand new, still with tags on and others had been to many lessons. Where helpful ex-owners had removed the size labels, as usual, the team needed to lay out the trousers to guess the waist size.

With the school uniforms bagged up, it was onto more colourful, less... grey clothing. First up were men's clothing donations where there were a lot of brands. Someone was clearly upgrading last season's Gucci/Lacoste/Givenchy for something new. Working through the women's clothes donations was fairly straight forward apart from some interesting sizing by the brands. A "medium" top that could fit 2 GoodGymers in it for example, well, that seemed like more of an (X)XL.

The final sizing issue that the team encountered was the size of the boxes in the storage room. Some were overflowing before the new donations even arrived. No matter how much Angela and Kash tried to squeeze in more jumpers or t-shirts, they wouldn't go. Admitting defeat, task owner Tamzin had to find the team some new overflow storage.

Today's session was all sorting and no pack creation because the ticket printer was on the blink, meaning that the tickets for new requests couldn't be created. Sevan had a look as the task wrapped up, pressed some buttons and like magic, the printer spat out a sheet of requests, ready for the afternoon's volunteering group to work through.

The latest Sunday session for Care4Calais, a charity that helps asylum seekers and refugees receive clothing appropriate for living in the UK, saw a sudden deficit of men on the task. The all-female crew, Angela, Libi, Kash, and task owner Tamzin, was capable of everything that the male GoodGymers could do, apart from one job: reliably testing the sizes of large men's clothes as trying them on would have been futile.

"The concept of being a large man is so abstract to me. How can I tell large from double extra large?" - Kash.

The community mission was the first Care4Calais session for Libi, who returned with enthusiasm for her second even GoodGym task. She joined Kash in making standard small men's packs, preparing customised parcels for hotels that received funding for clothing for refugees, and then sorting donated men's t-shirts by size - the trickiest task.

Meanwhile, Angela, already familiar with the basics of the Care4Calais system, joined Tamzin in making custom packs, carrying boxes up or down the stairs, and then helping Tamzin load the donations into the car for later distribution.

Tamzin has recently refurbished her Care4Calais hub, making more space for volunteers to work next to one another. We're looking forward to returning for the next session very soon and clearing the abundance of donations with double efficiency! We will be back for that task next week.