This morning's session at the Baby Bank saw Mark, Gillian and Sheila again faced with mounds of donated clothes to sort. We were giving the clothes a secondary sort after a corporate team had been in, and stow spares away in labelled bags. Sheila and Gillian were also asked to each bag up sets of clothes to go out to families in need. It's amazing how a full box of clothes never seems to have quite all items you need!

Gillian, Mark and Sheila all helped out at the Baby Bank. We were warned to be prepared as we went upstairs, and we were faced with a huge pile of donations waited to be sorted. Mark soon got the hang of what to check for before items of clothes could be accepted, and we all settled down to checking through the donations, and putting them into bags and boxes ready for use. We made a small but significant dent in the piles. Well done to Mark on his first Baby Bank session

10 Goodgymmers met at the Community Centre for tonight’s chair mending task.

We welcomed first timer Mark to the group by introducing ourselves and naming a film starting with the first letter of our name.

The group then headed into the park for 3 rounds of meet and retreat. Runners set off clockwise and the walkers anticlockwise, when they met they did a different exercise each time (jumping jacks, squats and lunges) and then retreated back the way they came. When they met again they confused themselves and went the opposite way to the last time and repeated!

Once all 3 rounds were completed the team headed back into the community centre to tackle the task. There have been multiple chair mending tasks this year but for Adam, Anne-Laure and Mark it was their first time and so Jack, our chairperson for the night, gave a demonstration and the team set to work.

Mark, Gillian, Rachel, Adam and Anne-Laure tackled fixing the screws onto the seats, whilst Scarlett, Matthew, Amy and Jess worked on attaching the seats to the bases. Jack and Amy then caused confusion on which way to turn the screwdriver – clockwise or anticlockwise? And was it a different direction depending on how you were looking at it??! I’m not sure this ever got resolved!

Lots of screwing, poking, pushing and pulling later the team had fixed 10 chairs, saving the community centre another whopping £2250 on purchasing new ones!

Just in case we weren’t dizzy enough by this point we then played a round of musical chairs where the chairless person came up with a chair based exercise for everyone to complete. Of course we completed the rounds both clockwise and anticlockwise and were serenaded with a series of ‘chair’ based songs such as ‘I’ll be chair for you’ , ‘Reach out (I'll be Chair)' and of course music from Cher herself!