It's strange to say for an organisation whose aim is to not be needed any more, but it's good to see more people coming into the food bank again.
In the past couple of months the place seemed to lose a little of its sense of purpose as we felt there were just not enough people coming in, and donations piled up.
We have had to stack up about a ton of baked beans - I do not exaggerate - as people keep giving them. Our notices at donation centres say a diplomatic "not now, thanks" to beans and soup - perhaps that should be more forcefully expressed: "You would get sick of beans and soup. So do poor people. NO MORE, for God's sake!"
Among the donations sorted while we wait for customers was a record-breaker for Glasgow North West Food Bank. From a carrier bag I extracted two jars of Dolmio pasta sauce that looked a bit brown. I had a feeling they were wrong 'uns , then I found the date on the lid. It turned out they had passed their best some time in early 2001. If you think about the events that have past since then - 9/11, that war thingy in Iraq - those jars have seen some history.
We also received 24 cans of cannabis energy drink, which as a donation to a food bank, and as a thing in itself, is wrong on so many levels. I mean, how many stoners do you know with energy? The money - they would have cost around £30, says Google - could have much better been spent on that milk and spuds and juice I always go on about. And there's none of the active ingredient of cannabis in them anyway, the label says, so singularly pointless.
But things are getting back to a more normal level of operations now.
The dip, it seems, was a combination of factors - the Trussell Trust policy of insisting on a referral; changes in the way at least one referring agency operated; a big rise in the preceding months which had made us extra busy; and changes in the DWP referrals policy which brought a big drop in customers from that direction, and which we suspect were made with the political motivation of cutting food bank use figures.
We have been contacting agencies that can refer and taking some other measures because we were sure the need was out there.
And our return to non-stop work on the Tuesdays I'm at the foodbank confirms that.
That earlier surge was caused by changes to the benefit rules, so we await the introduction of universal credit with some trepidation.
One thing I have noticed among the current clientele is a rise in "colds" - not people with blocked-up noses, although they may have those too, but people with no gas, electricity or other means of heating food who need stuff in their parcels that can be eaten cold.
Happy days.
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