Three of us arrived at Frenford Food Bank to offload two weeks worth of Scout donations. It was good to see our Helen was available to join us today, she was a great help. Ed took charge of another helper who was the young Son of a Lady in the keep fit class.

The variation in goods that we get in these donations is considerable from a tin of biscuits from Harrods to an opened packet of Walkers Mix Ups where they'd taken their favourites out and sellotaped the bag back down 🙄 Its our job to weed out items like that which are opened and can't be used also the items way beyond their best date e.g. rice pudding from 2015. There are some of us prepared to take stuff that is a little bit past its best date home and replace it with fresh next time we come but 2015 was a bit much even for us 😳 The few oddities we get are far outweighed by the rest of the donations most of which is clearly bought new to give to the foodbank. With two full trolley losds sorted the shelves were considerably fuller than when we started.

Now if I could have just remembered to have taken photos it would have been a job well done🤦‍♀️ So here are some old ones which pretty much demonstrate what we did 😆

Title credit goes to Linda when she saw some pics on the WhatsApp chat.

The Wanstead Community Gardeners put out a call for assistance with tackling a rose bush/tree growing through and over another tree. Sounds relatively straightforward, but as usual not quite that simple... We started with picking up some tools, with a ladder being delivered as well. The tricky part turned out to find a safe stable base for the ladder to be able to reach up and 'attack' the inch thick branches overhead.

We managed a fair amount, filling up most of a large builders bag with chopped up branches before admitting defeat and tidy up.

Final verdict: this might be a job for the experts!

When the Wanstead Community Gardners needed some furniture moving to help them celebrate their 21st birthday of course Marian called in her reliable "Heavy Mob" GoodGym.

5 of us made our way to a local address where Peter picked up two tables, Ed popped another two on to a small trolley and James grabbed two chairs which left Linda and Sibel a cushion each and they thoroughly enjoyed the unfair division of labour 😂.

Back at The Corner House we met Helen and Cedric. Helen joined us setting up the tables and chairs before being called away to help the task owner with something. Cedric had brought some compost and disappeared off to deposit it somewhere useful to the community gardeners.

There was a little waiting around until the gazebos arrived but when they did we soon had them put up with a little improvisation for a couple of missing parts. We are nothing if not resourceful in GoodGym.