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Day 9/8 postscript - Gate Outcomes - 2019

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  37,201 hot meals served to over 3,000 guests in nine locations. The Gate peaked at 145 overnight guests, full capacity, here's how our week ended: L was found accommodation and is now off the street, he has a new job starting next week A was given the help he needed to get Universal Credit, he and N were also referred to a winter shelter. S’s key worker visited her at the centre and arranged for her to go into hospital while he continues to work on making her accommodation secure. L started a new job and received his first pay packet on Saturday, the Crisis Case Mgt. team have taken on his case, are helping him get a new passport and will continue to advocate for him in 2020. M was reconnected to services in Birmingham (where he already has a connection) and given a coach ticket to return to accommodation there. Two guests decided they wanted to return to their home country of Lithuania and we arranged their flights to return to their homes, a third guest h
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Day 8/8 - 29Dec - Final Shift

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The last shift is over, I've caught up with some sleep and cleaned all the cheese sauce off of my smartwatch to find the week in the Gate kitchen finished at about 101,000 steps, 85km and 92 hours standing. I don't know what that all means beyond being reminded that kitchen work on minimum wage and a zero hour contract is a very tough way to earn a crust, forget those tv shows. Tonight we throw everything we have got at the ovens and Bratt braiser to use up the last of the fresh fruit and veg. By now the guests and volunteers have good appetites and used to the routine of three hearty hot meals a day now I make six large trays of cauli and broc cheese, that's two hours of grating, after hunting down anything that looks like cheese for the huge pot of white covering sauce, then onto the Bratt to fry the parsnips again. James is probing, digitally of course, the roast chicken telling me he is looking for over 75C for thirty seconds from each joint and clear juices, e
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Day 7/8 - 28Dec - Sick as a parrot

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Today it's a full stocktake of the larder to see what fresh food we have left for the last lunches and dinners before we close on Monday morning with a final hot breakfast for our guests and they return to the streets of London. Waiting in our larder are spuds (6 crates), parsnips 40kg, Aubergine 30kg, Cabbage whites 30kg, onions x2 crates, butternut squash x74, broccoli half trays x15, old cauli x10, a tray of carrots, white Mushrooms x 5 trays, Vine tomatoes x70, Lettuce Romana x20,  fennel x2boxes, celeriac x5 large and so on .... Our kitchen has a 40 gallon "tilting braising Bratt" pan that makes light work of braising or frying, Jules has been driving it hard this week turning out his signature stews. Chef is back from secondment, today it's two tajines, meat or veg, with spicing that let's us use a variety of remaining vegetables, fresh or tinned. There is still a lot of Harrod's purple broccoli waiting to be used, so that's for a f
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The children's messages to The Gate

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A corner of The Gate's communal area is covered in Christmas cards. Look closer, it is messages being sent to our guests from the heart of what I imagine as the Children's Fire - link So spare a moment hearing from our children at this Inner London Academy. If you liked the Children's Fire youtube - link My 2019 Justgiving fundraiser: link Last year's Gate Diary 2018 - link Regards, Paul -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NB: These diary entries are written as a thank-you to everyone who has donated to Crisis At Christmas , would still like to, or just curious to know what happens behind the scenes. I write this diary to let you know how we spend your money and to encourage you to keep supporting Crisis At Christmas as it depends upon your donations or volunteering to fund the huge Christmas operation and
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Day 6/8 - 27Dec - Practicalities

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Christmas day is over for another year and fatigue setting in it's a muted kitchen as we go head down and prep a fantastic hearty beef and vegetarian stew with lots of side vegetables. By this stage of the week our guests are into the groove and eating well, larger meals, more variety and very nutritious. In front of house our volunteers are chatting with our guests around The Gate who are now more familiar and comfort with us and engaging in pastimes such as karaoke, bingo, football, jigsaws, chess, art, cinema and lots more. This leads on to our guests being far more amenable and comfortable attending our AA and NA meetings which can be life changing for some of them, there is also help and advice on the practicalities of rehousing, travel and repatriation. We provide, of course, the full range of NHS services with a backup transport team so guests in need get seen by volunteer doctors, dentists and opticians, usually hard to access during the year. Manicu
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Day 5/8 - 26Dec - Spice Café

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We have discovered that a café down the road is selling the synthetic drug known as Spice - link - and we have been calling out five ambulances a day to deal with its side effects, often a comatose guest  on the floor where they fall randomly and then lie unconconscious, cadaverlike. Whilst this is The Gate that specialises in the homeless with significant addictions, and we are familiar and perhaps blasé towards alcohol addiction, it is distressing for volunteers to see comatose guests lying on the floor somewhere indoors or tarmac outside in the cold. The NHS ambulance teams are being very patient with us after regular callouts but understand our mission that makes this London Academy school a repeating 999 all of a sudden, these ambulance teams are of course inspirational and it is humbling to see them in action whatever the circumstances. Epilesy has been a recurring theme too with some guests having tonic-clonic seizures, previously known as a "grand mal"
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Day 4/8 - 25Dec - 114

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Happy Christmas and thanks for reading this far. This year we are cooking 114 turkeys in The Gate kitchen, a huge number because we are looking after the Warehouse team and some other Crisis centres. I left four of the Afternoon team at midnight last night still in front of the ovens and returned at 3pm this afternoon to find them at their stations,  James said they finished at 02:30hrs Christmas morning! We stood at whiteboards listening to Chef allocate out the tasks for today and everything seemed surprisingly calm and relaxed for a 7pm target serve time. James was TurkeyMan, just 60 of them today, Sagar was RoastspudandvegMan and I was ParsnipMan. I say it every year in my diary that if you ever cook a roast or BBQ poultry please invest in a digital thermometer probe to test the centre of the bird to avoid stomach upsets or trip to A&E. I do the parnsnips every year because it involves a couple of hours in front of two large woks of very very hot oil balanced on
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