After a morning of cheering almost a record-breaking number of young runners at Acton junior parkrun, four GoodGymers went for a 6 km walk to another task in Ealing. Maria stepped in at the last-minute to join the session with Care4Calais after finding out that a slot had unexpectedly freed up. Well done, Maria!

Sevan, Steph Ducat, Kash and Maria met with task owner Tamzin, who had three types of jobs for them.

Pushchair washing

A wave of donated baby 4-wheels just hit Care4Calais - some particularly grubby - which meant that Kash’s services were in demand. As the usual pram cleaner, Kash swapped her socks for crocs, grabbed a brush and a hose, and spent a decent chunk of the session enjoying herself outdoors, giving used pushchairs a good jet wash. She even found a 10-pence coin - a tip for her efforts - in one of the vehicles.

Men’s clothes sorting

Who would better handle categorising and organising mixed-up men’s stock than a double-act of GoodGym guys? Sevan and Steph powered through all sizes of masculine outfits, including a quite niche 6XL pair of trousers. They found a range of formal apparel: suits, shirts and waistcoats, unfortunately, inappropriate for the asylum seekers living in hotels. The session had a record number of unsuitable donations: from heavily worn underwear to non-clothing items such as a deodorant or hunk soap, which were deemed to end up in a bin or a charity shop.

Making packs

Maria lent Tamzin a hand with making parcels for adults and children, including shoe packs and bags with school uniforms. Tamzin had special goodie bags for kids containing water bottles, notebooks, hair clips and bands for little girls. Maria even packed some really cute carrier bags made of material that felt like a teddy bear!

The last 20 minutes of the task everyone spent packing up excess sorted men's clothes into temporary boxes and bags, then stomping on cardboard shoe boxes to fit them in a recycling bin. Four GoodGymers got so much done in just two hours! Tamzin received a full 8-hour volunteer workday of help to support refugees in a single GoodGym session - how impactful is that!

The first session of May with Care4Calais brought a lot of clothes sorting. A regular activity for the Care4Calais volunteers. New donations had been gathered from other groups all over London and now needed to be sized and squeezed into the Ealing stock room.

The new donation bags were hauled into the sorting room where Steph, Kash and Sevan worked their way though each one. The first few contained a lot of women's dresses, a cat suit, a extra large jump suit and a bride's maid shirt, probably from a hen do. The bride's maid shirt and everything else needed to be measured up and stored in the right place... meaning overflow bags as the stock boxes were - still - mostly full to bursting.

Next up were the men's donations, which were much less interesting than the women's, as usual. There were some nice denim jackets and a leather-ish one whose best days were in the past. It was leaving a trail of black flakes all over the floor, so it went into the pile of rags to get rid of. Sevan went to help find sports clothes and PJs for children, aided by an unexpected find. There was a small bag labelled "Women's Pyjamas" in exactly the size he was looking for. That never happens at Care4Calais.

Less seasonal pieces like scarves and thermals were put to one side as making people feel toastier wasn't a priority in May. Other unusual finds included a magic cape and a Minion top that had everyone saying "bananas" for the rest of the task.

To reach the Care4Calais on late Sunday morning, Sevan and Kash ran from Acton up and down Hanger Hill. At the task location, they met James, who had arrived for his first task in Ealing. The fourth musketeer slot had been filled by one of Tamzin's recent regular volunteers who himself lived in a hotel for asylum seekers that Care4Calais supported.

The challenge task owner Tamzin had this spring was the abundance of stock (partially due to other C4C storage spaces handing her their goods) and a halved number of requests from the hotels. Those were generally good problems to have.

Sevan joined Tamzin in making custom packs, while Kash, James and the third volunteer sorted through loads of women's and men's clothes. If you think the abundance of outfits made it easier for Sevan to find a t-shirt for a woman who had requested it, think again. He had to dig through the layers of tangled long-sleeved tops in the overflowing boxes and couldn't even reach the most suitable one, which must have been buried underneath.

Meanwhile, for the sorting crew, the task of putting filtered clothes away was the main challenge: squeezing things in, finding the overflow bags for the surplus items and making new containers for clothes that were impossible to fit anywhere. Despite having to virtually bend the rules of physics to find homes for all the outfits, the team smashed sorting the whole huge batch of donations in two hours!

Notable finds:

• Christmas-themed Elf movie pyjamas
• An elf hat
• Skull socks (sadly, not suitable for refugees)
• A straw fedora hat
• African headscarves
• A Minion's costume

For Ealing GoodGymers' second session at Care4Calais this month, there were more newly arrived donations from other charities and storage units to sort through. There were new requests too from beneficiaries and some admin work to complete.

Kash prepared packs for new requests that had come in. Finding everything that was needed mostly went smoothly, except an unusual request for orthopedic shoes that couldn't be sourced in the stock room. When the pre-prepared medium clothing packs for men ran out, small packs were substituted in their place with the hope that recipients would be on the slimmer side. Kash finished the session with record keeping, noting down which requests had been fulfilled for beneficiaries.

In another room, Penny, Maria and Sevan were working through the incoming donations. Most of the clothing was for women and children, including a bag full of tiny, cute baby clothes. There was a lot of variety in the other boxes too, with some upmarket women's clothing, children's football boots that went straight back out to a recipient and some unusual olive coloured cloth. It took a while to figure out what the olive material should be used for. Was it an enormous comedy bow tie? Was it a blanket? Maria eventually got the gold star by figuring out that they were trousers that tied together at each hip ⭐.

With the new clothes sorted, it was time to move them into the stock room. Here, the team found a problem as there were more women's clothes coming in than were being given out. Netball and basketball skills came in useful as clothes were shot towards the sky, landing on top of tall piles of stock (there was a sense of déjà vu with this). Where no more clothes could fit on or above the shelves, there were overflow bags dotted around the room, which also filled up. Thankfully, the men's and children's clothes didn't have the same problem.

The next trip to Care4Calais is on the 12th of April, where Sevan offered to help task owner Tamzin clear out some of the excess stock.

After a coffee stop, Steph, Maria, Kash and Sevan walked to their second community mission of the day at Care4Calais, where task owner Tamzin had collected lots of new stock from another C4C site, which needed to be sorted and stored. Looking into the stock room, there was nowhere to walk. The floor was full of bags, which was the huge task that team needed to solve.

There was a lot of variety in the relocated items, with the team sharing what they'd found in each:

"I've got women's large bottoms"

"A bag of bikinis?"

"This is a bag of babies. Don't open it!"

The babies were actually baby clothes and the sack they were in would contain hundreds of tiny items, so the advice from Tamzin was not to open that sack of worms today. Steph discovered a cache of handbags, there were stilettos, pillowcases and there was even a purse full of cards and cash, all 20 years out of date.

The donations either went into stock, into a charity donation group, one for rags...

"Is the washing machine on?" - Kash
"Yes" - Tamzin
"Good. If there isn't then it feels like there's an earthquake" - Kash

...or into the washing machine, if there was a chance of cleaning the clothes up for new recipients. The team wasn't working fast enough to cause an earthquake today. Must try harder next time.

Over 2 hours, the team had a huge impact in the stock room, with all of the newly received clothes cleared off the floor. Some sort of order was restored. As much as there normally was in the stock room, at least.

Today's Care4Calais session saw the 2-2 theme from the earlier Pitshanger Junior parkrun continue, with the team's skirts staying on through this session too. There was no other fancy dress on display as the start of the task was all business.

Boxes of school uniforms had arrived at C4C's West London base and the first task was to sort through them, getting rid of anything that was damaged or poor quality. Next, the clothes were organised by size. Instead of the child's age, which GoodGymers had used for previous school uniform tasks, the key today was the waist size as most donations were trousers. Some pairs were brand new, still with tags on and others had been to many lessons. Where helpful ex-owners had removed the size labels, as usual, the team needed to lay out the trousers to guess the waist size.

With the school uniforms bagged up, it was onto more colourful, less... grey clothing. First up were men's clothing donations where there were a lot of brands. Someone was clearly upgrading last season's Gucci/Lacoste/Givenchy for something new. Working through the women's clothes donations was fairly straight forward apart from some interesting sizing by the brands. A "medium" top that could fit 2 GoodGymers in it for example, well, that seemed like more of an (X)XL.

The final sizing issue that the team encountered was the size of the boxes in the storage room. Some were overflowing before the new donations even arrived. No matter how much Angela and Kash tried to squeeze in more jumpers or t-shirts, they wouldn't go. Admitting defeat, task owner Tamzin had to find the team some new overflow storage.

Today's session was all sorting and no pack creation because the ticket printer was on the blink, meaning that the tickets for new requests couldn't be created. Sevan had a look as the task wrapped up, pressed some buttons and like magic, the printer spat out a sheet of requests, ready for the afternoon's volunteering group to work through.