A small band this evening of Hilary, Rebecca and Nick - very much quality over quantity - met up at the Aquatic Centre (just about still light-ish), and navigated our way through the Olympic Park along the canal to find Ange waiting for us, with spades and wheelbarrows neatly parked...

The dune of sand(?) that we'd initially attacked back in July was our task for tonight (https://www.goodgym.org/v3/reports/leaps-and-mounds) - the dune had shrunk a bit since our last visit as Ange (with a few other smaller people helpers) had managed to get some of it moved to various parts of the playground over the summer, but there was still enough to keep us amused for a good hour.

With Hilary and Rebecca on shoveling duty and Nick on wheel barrowing, we soon established a chain gang that worked pretty well to get the sand shifted from outside of Ange's "office" to near the Big Ship where we slowly built a new dune...with only three of us on duty there were no tea breaks allowed in spite of occasional groans from one staff member whose shoulders were starting to complain.

When Ange comes out and compliments you on a job well done, you know you've done something pretty good, and at 8 we parked the spades and barrows - there's still quite a bit more to get moved, but we don't think you can long jump into what remains...which is real progress - and had a sociable run back to the Olympic Park along the canal, avoiding the occasional unlit pedestrian and bike rider along the way...

Wow it gets dark early these days...very much a head torch lead litter picking session this evening with the Friends of Chandos Road, where our hosts Mark and Leela were pleased to see Rebecca, Ciarán, Tendai and Nick arrive ready to get picking.

The area we focused on was near the recently planted Flower Meadow, and for which (great news) the Friends of Chandos Road have secured additional funding to expand the meadow (for which they may well need some volunteer assistance to lay turf, plant seeds etc...watch this space).

With darkness now upon us, we split into smaller groups each with a bag and litter pickers and got going as best we could in all directions. A large pile of cigarette butts occupied Rebecca and her group for a long time, whilst the other group encountered the remnants of an extensive buffet and a lot of bottle lids which needed some effort to prise them out of the ground...

Before long we had three pretty full bags of rubbish, and so called it an evening - with litter pickers returned, and Rebecca kindly agreeing to take the rubbish bags to her nearest large bin on the way home, we were thanked by the team for our efforts and headed off into the darkness.

Next week we're at the Hackney Marshes Adventure Playground to help Ange with whatever she's got planned...it might involve sand, logs, bark or wheelbarrows...

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...