Baggage

I haven’t volunteered with Team London, or nay of the other organisations, since August 2019.  I was not selected for the reduced opportunities in 2020 and 2021 and the London Squad for the Euros did not, apparently, need the backups they suggested they might. That, or they lost my email address,

So, although it was very hard to get up at 6am on a Bank Holiday, PY and I were in Green Park at 8am registering ourselves at the Volunteer station for the Vitality London 10000; a 10km run.  We were staffing one of the baggage drops.  There was a very ‘brief’ briefing and much discussion between the volunteers as to which system we were adopting for attaching baggage labels and ordering the bags for easy retrieval later.  I had, I thought, a decent system which, a fellow volunteer descried a very organised, but I am bot sure it was any better or worse than anybody else’s version.  My wave of runners (purple) all needed to have dropped their bags off and be at the starting point by about 10:30 and the first returners collected their bags by about 11:45am.  All my section’s bags had been returned by just after 1pm. It was great to be about and about with people again and there was a lovely atmosphere.

I’ve done lots of different types of volunteering over the last few years and much of it is wayfinding: helping people locate something or answer questions about interesting things around London.  I think it’s great and I hope people get a lot of use form it but it’s a nice-to-have service.  Today, there was a definite need and purpose to what we were doing and, sometimes, that makes all the difference. 

I did cook tomorrow’s dinner for PY in order to use up some of the vegetables and to allow him to work late if he needs to. Given the  amount that I ended up making I think it will also work for Wednesday’s dinner when I am back from the funeral. Then I washed up and started again with tonight’s meal.

After dinner we logged onto Zoom to watch a Hidden London virtual tour of the new Liverpool Street and Moorgate stations that have been connected underground as part of Crossrail. It was really interesting to see, especially given the fact we’d done the in-person Moorgate tour recently.  I felt a bit sorry for the woman giving the tour as she had quite a cough and some technical issues which seems to disrupt her flow but the information was solid and the walk around the Crossrail public areas pretty impressive. Online rumour has it that Crossrail, operating as the Elizabeth Line, will be opening mid-May. They were giving nothing away on this tour.