With Saturday's fête fast approaching, three GoodGymers joined forces with a group of dedicated church volunteers to help spruce up the grounds of Emmanuel Church.

The weather wasn't quite as kind as the forecast had suggested. What was supposed to be a light drizzle turned into something a little more persistent, but that didn't stop anyone getting stuck in. Armed with brooms, rakes and plenty of determination, we set about sweeping leaves and tidying the churchyard to make sure it was looking its best for the weekend's visitors.

Working alongside friends of the church, we cleared paths, gathered piles of fallen leaves and generally gave the outdoor spaces a much-needed autumn refresh. Despite the damp conditions, spirits stayed high and it was great to see everyone pitching in to help prepare for an important community event.

As with many successful GoodGym tasks, there was a reward waiting at the end. Once the work was done, we were welcomed inside for a generous spread of sandwiches, providing the perfect opportunity to warm up, chat and admire the results of our efforts.

A huge thank you to everyone who braved the rain to help out. Here's hoping the churchyard stays looking tidy and the fête enjoys much drier weather than we did! 🍂🥪☔

Our (now regular) return to the Crisis Warehouse this evening to find out what Chris had in store for us - and as always he had a long to do list, and a seven strong group of willing volunteers keen to get their hands dirty, and as it turned out their shoulder, arms, hands and knees, always bend with the knees..., a pretty good workout.

Before we got there though, it was a warm welcome to first time GoodGymmer Charlie, and a hello again/welcome back to Rebecca - both of whom joined Graham, Hilary, Paul and Nick on the run from Freaks and Geeks to the warehouse, where we then met up with Irina.

After a quick briefing and intro from Chris, it was down to work, which tonight involved a lot of moving of cages full of sacks that had been delivered from the various Crisis Retails shops around London, and which contained clothing items that the shops had deemed no longer "sellable" on the rails due to the change from summer to winter, or that had simply not proved attractive to the buying public.

With Hilary and Charlie on lift duty, the rest of us were tasked with collecting the cages on the upper floor and parking them by the lift - at which point we headed downstairs to do the unloading and sorting into summer/winter cull, shop specific summer/winter keep, and various miscellaneous other bags which required a whole new categorisation and parking area.

Fair to say this kept us all very busy, doubly so when Chris opened the loading bay door to reveal a van full of more bags that Irina quickly got round to emptying into yet more cages, and which the rest of us then sorted into the relevant piles. Once this was done it was then a case of loading the now sorted bags into cages, parking them by the lift and getting them back to the upper floor where Graham and Rebecca were in charge of parking.

With darkness descending, and the clock ticking way beyond 8pm, Chris produced (from somewhere) one final large wooden pallet full of bags, which we quickly got sorted and caged...and we called it an evening.

As always Chris was extremely grateful for our collective efforts, as he outlined his master plan to us for the most efficient way to manage the storage and distribution of all the bags - we'll be back in a month's time (27th October) to further progress his vision...