A gorgeous day in a gorgeous park!

Stanley Park is really beautiful and worth a visit for it's striking terraces, the Isla Gladstone Conservatory and bandstand, lake area, daffodil field and much more. We slowly made our way around picking up the usual debris of city park. The team there work so hard to keep it in good shape and it shows.

We had our own competition of who could find the strangest or most interesting item, with joint winners Christina for a toy train and Daniel who found a hammer! The prize of a much coveted Stanley Park Tote Bag jealously eyed up by yours truly (who doesn't love a good tote bag!)

Fabulous to have Phillip join us for his first GoodGym task, welcome to the team Phil!

We were also made up to find a couple of painted rocks left hidden for to put a surprise smile on peoples faces by the Liverpool Kindness Rocks project!

On a sunny a day, which warmed up nicely 5 intrepid Goodgymers went litter picking in Anfield. We were doing it in conjunction with James Coates from Alley Angels who kindly provided the rubbish bags. I’m not sure the pictures really convey how bad the areas were but you see from the litter picture just how much rubbish there was. Multiply this by every area in the UK and you’ll see how bad this litter problem really is.

Two spots were tackled and 10 bags of litter collected. Both sights are blighted and so for us to be able to clear them in an hour and a half was amazing. But that’s the power of what Good Gym does. It was a mixture of experience and nee members. A huge thanks to Jess, Daniel and Sallyann who are all starting to rack up their Good Gym tasks and it was lovely to see you and chat as well as seeing Pauline, who makes the trip over from south of the river every time to do tasks in Liverpool.

We have to break this cycle of people dropping litter but at least for a day two areas of Anfield are going to be litter free.

Thanks this week go to Christina mainly for the pun. What a team we were: Rowan, Christina, Pauline, Daniel, Helena and Mat. A MASSIVE WELCOME to Helena as this was her first task for Good Gym. It was also only Daniel's second one, so good to see him come back for more and the hope is that you both enjoyed it, got a lot out of it and will want to return again. And of course we had four not so old, old timers making up the intrepid team. Christina in particular was welcome back after a busy time away. It is always lovely to see people again after so long.

The weather decided to dump some drizzly rain on us on the way to the task but of course as we arrived it pretty much stopped. Not dampened by this we met the lovely Jo, who runs the food bank and got stuck into the first task of the day, which was to unpack various food items into small crates. We polished this off in no time and then had to sort hundreds of packs of long life milk (hence the pun) into date order as some of it is about to go out of date in November. As a bonus we managed to also check dates on crate loads of cereal and so in only an hour we had managed to do more than Jo had dreamed we would be able to do and was really pleased. It still amazes me how much a group of people are able to get done in only an hour, which is part of the magic of Good Gym. And a different group get to do it all again on Thursday.

People are getting pretty desperate out there and so this food bank is their only means to getting food. Helping Jo out sorting is vital so that she can get on and actually get the food out to those who need it most, so well done one and all.