Daryl, Ed, Maria, Richard and Sam met up Ian at the Old Alleynian Rugby Club as this month we focused on draining and clearinf the ditches as it had become clogged up with leaves and could affect the playing fields as these ditches are used to drain the water when it rains.

Richard had the pleasure of using the leaf blower as the rest of us used rakes and leaf pickers to clear the ditches of leaves.

An hour and a half later, the ditches were primarily unblocked.

We met the lovely Kathleen from Moorlands Community Garden who asked if we could shift some containers full of garden waste from the middle of the community garden to the composting areas at the back. Half way through moving the garden waste, we were tasked with a new job to cut back some huge bramble bushes which had taken over the back of the community garden. Splitting into two groups: the "bramblers" (tackling the bushes) and the amblers (walking the garden waste from one side to another), we cracked on. It's a tenuous link here but bear with me, the puns were hard for this one! An hour later and we'd emptied three or four big wheelie bins of garden waste into the composting areas and had totally removed the massive bramble bush!

Shrove Tuesday? Suitcase Tuesday more like, for eight goodgymmers in Lambeth. Andrea from Get Rid of It and Donate (GROAD) organised us, to organise bags full of donations, into piles of trousers, jumpers, gloves, hats and blankets.

James had the official role of suitcase sanitiser and presented a one person conveyor belt of efficiency. Emma first displayed skills at blanket rolling and was soon promoted to Head of the Womenswear department. Ian has helped GROAD a fair few times now, so knew the drill and bagged up an impressive number of rucksacks of warm outfits for our rough sleepers.

John certainly ran the furthest, visiting from Camden, to help weed out the donations that were frankly, a little more suitable for summer than a cold London winter. Stuart proudly hit the jackpot to find some NEW pairs of socks - the only kind that are suitable to add into the packs for people sleeping rough.

Tracey and Gillian got stuck in sorting tents, sleeping bags and found out lots of great info from Andrea about how the donations get to GROAD. Thank you local community drop offs! And see here for our mention in the GROAD website blog!! https://www.getridofit-donate.com/blog

We managed to fill 40 suitcases with essentials to hand out to rough sleepers. Here comes the roll call for volunteers to hand these out next week on the Strand - sign up if you’re keen!

Oh and Vix (myself) brought brownies. Cause they’re easier to individually wrap in a COVID friendly fashion, than pancakes are! A brownie-fied successful community mission all round. Thanks for having us Andrea!

Back to the basement we went with GROAD, this time to sort donations for children. We had 4 categories to start off with - boys, girls, soft toys and games - and quickly got to work tackling bags of mixed donations and sorting them into categorised bags. This soon became 5 categories when we added gender neutral toys, 6 when we separated books and 7 when we realised how many items there were for new parents. We were pretty swift at sorting, until Andrea pointed out that there were far too many bags and we needed to be more discerning about what was trash to be discarded, and what was a game rather than a toy. So we picked through the bags and soon had everything fitting much more neatly.  Then it was just a matter of loading up the van and tidying up, and we were done for another session.

Job done, feeling very humble to be able to help.