21/03/2025
It may (does) seem amazing but it’s 5 years since the first UK Covid lockdown, which means it’s now 5 years since Friday Fridge went “Full Time” (open every Friday, aside from one Christmas when the dates didn’t work out well), and that’s a great opportunity to give a massive thank you to the incredible heroes who enabled that then and have enabled it on every Friday since.
We owe a very big “Thank You” to Portsmouth City Council, in particular to councillors Suzy Horton, Steve Pitt and Chris Attwell for their unwavering and excellent support, and to the amazing Mark Sage for just making stuff happen.
We owe a huge thanks to Rev. Neil Smart of (at the time) St Jude’s Southsea, for his outstanding work in bending the ear of our bishop to keep the church (our venue) open for those Friday evenings (and only for those Friday evenings!) when all churches across the country were closed, and to the Bishop of Portsmouth for listening and responding so well.
The people we owe the most thanks to, and I’m running out of adequate superlatives now, are the Friday Fridge volunteers, who stepped up to not only keep this fantastic outreach open but to open it even more often. At a time when we had no idea what the risks were, when many people (not unreasonably) wouldn’t leave their house for fear of what was out there, they took that real risk and served their community and their God. Not fearlessly (definitely not fearlessly) but bravely despite that very real fear, because they knew that not only was the need still there but that need was greater than ever before. I really really can’t adequately express my overwhelming admiration and gratitude, I’m so utterly proud of them all.
Not one of them, to my knowledge, wears a cape and yet they are heroes from their heads to their toes and through to their cores.