Today five Goodgymers including one disguised in a North London football jersey helped with unloading food deliveries at South Ealing Community Food Cupboard.

We arrived in time for the second delivery of the day, with surplus food from supermarkets (eg Felix project) and everyone sprang into action. Unloading the crates full of fruit, vegetables and refrigerated stock.

I was the only first timer today so I got to watch as the team ferried crates back and forth from the delivery van, and the shelves were replenished. There was time to bag up some croissants and sausage rolls and then we left the regular volunteers to finish off preparing for when the doors open to the community at 1pm.

Monday the 8th of July was when the stars perfectly aligned and two food delivery vans landed flawlessly on time at St Mary’s Church to keep the regular volunteers and five GoodGymers occupied for over an hour with a mission to save nearly out-of-date food from going to the bin.

"It has never been so busy since I started coming here weekly. And that was three months ago!" - Martin.

The day was bright and full of secrets that were about to be exposed in the daylight.

• The regular at SECFC, Kamal, revealed himself as a crypto-GoodGymer who registered with us a few months ago but didn't get into the nitty-gritty of mission sign-ups just yet. Welcome Kamal!
• The first-timer at the St Mary's Church Monday task proclaimed herself as Kash, the organiser of the sessions and a bane of inboxes of the Ealing GoodGymers. She will keep the newsletters coming - if you have any questions about GoodGym, just email back!
• Anita, considered to be a newbie to GoodGym, demonstrated that she had already attended one community mission in South Ealing a few weeks ago and knew what to expect.
• Martin, who hadn't had a chance to sign up for today's task, revealed himself as a regular volunteer who comes to help SECFC each Monday anyway.
• Mystery canvas bags that the volunteers unloaded from the second van alongside the food revealed their contents: cleaning sponges, certainly not edible.
• I really wanted to give Alan a shout-out about his big reveal, but he's been an icon of transparency in his red t-shirt throughout the whole session, leaving no material for a mystery story. Maybe all that air of openness was to conceal that his next GoodGym task would be his 200th good deed?

The big team quickly dealt with two food deliveries, the latter being packed with a plethora of goodies saved from waste. Vegan rice pudding, easy peelers, pineapples, bananas, raw chicken and savoury pastries were numerous. After unloading the vans, there were still plenty of jobs for us to help organise the food:

• Martin was on chicken duty, handling raw meat and pondering, together with Alan, whether the experience makes people go vegetarian.
• Team Double-A (Anita and Alan) worked like a true A-Team on the watermelon slicing and bagging the portions to serve more households.
• Team Double-K (Kash and Kamal) packed the sausage rolls into family-size portions.

"It's a real transformation!", observed Alan, seeing how the empty room transformed in an hour into a treasury of foodstuffs.

All the volunteers were welcome to help themselves to the abundance of rescued surplus food.

South Ealing Community Food Cupboard is a community project set up to reduce waste and make surplus food from the supermarkets available to anyone in the local area. Join the great cause with other GoodGymers each Monday morning!

Sign up for your next session with them here:

• 15th July
• 22nd July
• 29th July
• 5th August
• 12th August
• 19th August

Alan and I were needed today. Well done to Alan for bagging up the pieces - rather, big lumps - of raw meat - good effort , Alan !

Last shift of the day and Jacquie left, but the 3 other goodgymers were out fo(u)r a surprise as Martin signed up during the day and three became four. Four fairy cleaners on board at ESK. The cleaning was done and dusted in no time. The team also joined the other volunteers to say a good bye to Norman as it was his last shift with ESK as going on a trip around Europe. The team did a great job and they all could leave earlier than expected.