Today was my third day of work with the ExtraCare Charitable Trust shop in Earlestown. In a nutshell, it's a voluntary job as a shop assistant, and I get to do everything from sorting clothes, to steaming them to make them look presentable, to storing them, to sticking them on the shop floor, to running the till... and there's probably more that I can't remember.

It's my Monday, Wednesday and Friday thing. Nine to five - and I believe I'm the only person who stays until the very minute the shop closes, other than the manager and deputy manager - and I bloody love it.

The work? Knackering, both physically and mentally. Carrying stuff to and fro all day gives you one hell of a workout. You haul huge plastic binbags full of clothes out of the stock room into the sorting room, spend an hour on your feet going through everything, tagging and hanging what's worth selling and binning what isn't. Then you haul them all into the steamer/kitchen area and spend a further hour steaming all the creases out of everything. Then, you have to haul it all upstairs, usually making several trips, to the storage rooms on the second floor. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sound tiring to you? It bloody well is. And it's flipping fantastic.

You see, it keeps you on your feet. There's always something to do. You're always moving about, carrying things, so you get a bit of exercise. And it's a challenge to the mind in some ways because of the complex sorting and pricing systems they've got going there. With clothes, you have to scrutinise them carefully for the slightest blemish. Marked ones get 'ragged', but the charity still receives money for scrapped clothing (50p per kilo).

For good clothes, you need to find a size, figure out whether it's been 'rotated' (sent in from another shop who's failed to sell it), and write all this down, along with the sort code (there's a different number for ladies' tops, ladies' trousers, menswear, kids' clothes, books, etc). Then you have to remember which hanger to use, remember to put a size cube on the hanger and actually tag the item. There's a lot to memorise, and when the process becomes second nature, things can be forgotten.

It's the same with running the till. There's this huge process you have to go through, and if you make a mistake, the till screams - quite literally - at you. If you press the 'cash total' button too early, for instance, it beeps loudly. And the method's slightly different when people pay via. card. I learned this the hard way the other day when I inadvertently created an anomaly in the shop's books - which Dawn the manager had to rectify with a call to the Head Office. Er - oops. Sorry, Dawn!

There's always something to do. We get loads of bags of donations every day, so there's those to be sorted. If not, there's tidying to be done in the stock room, on the shop floor - anywhere in the shop, really! Or, if you're a nutter like me who loves making tea/coffee for people, there's that to be done.

So, it keeps me busy, it hones my organisational skills, keeps me mentally alert, teaches me to socialise... and then there's the 25% discount and first pickings of anything that comes into the shop! Huzzah!

Speaking of which, I brought three more lovely items home today, all clothing. Two tops and a hat.

One of the tops I'm wearing right now, for the strange/pervy ones of you out there. It's a plain black top with sleeves to the elbows, a lovely snug fit, only there's this pretty nifty waistcoat sort of thing stitched to it, attached at the shoulders and waist seams. The waistcoat bit is buttonless, and has pink roses with green leaves on a black background. It's awesome and it's mine.

The hat I bought to go with it. It's also plain black, 100% felt (in other words, I should probably avoid wearing it in the rain), and it's a bit like a bowler hat in that it has the rounded top, but the rim is different. A Crappy Paint Diagram would illustrate it better, I think...

Unfortunately for you, I can't be bothered doing a Crappy Paint Drawing. We'll say it's essentially a bowler hat, but with a different rim that curls in on itself at the end. Thankfully, it was just my size - and I generally have appalling luck when it comes to hat sizes, due to my abnormally small head. That is, every top hat I've tried on has consumed me right to my shoulders.

The other top's pretty typical of me - a white v-neck paisley affair with a collar you might find on a shirt, only this top has no buttons. The sleeves are flared and split up to the elbow. I have a vintage 60's brown suede waistcoat that might look pretty nifty with it.

I'm thinking of modifying the hat much like I did my grey trilby. In a moment of boredom I put a snazzy lilac, black and white band around the trilby. In a moment of further boredom, I them proceeded to whack a whopping great faux lilac flower on there. Since I want this hat to match the top, I'll need a faux pink rose, which no doubt the flea market will supply me with. I have a hot pink ribbon upstairs somewhere, in my box of Arty-Farty Stuff, but I want something patterned, not solid colour. Perhaps some material which matches the waistcoat part of the top; pink flowers, black background. Something where the colours are roughly the same, but the details are a lot finer.

That would probably work a lot better than the ribbon, in fact. The pink on the waistcoat is much more subtle than the pink of the ribbon.

I believe someone on add_a_writer requested photos of all my hats. This I shall do - when I commandeer a digital camera. If I did it with my 35mm baby SLR, it'd be - what - three years before you saw the pictures? By which time I'd have probably died by choking on a hat because of the sheer number.

Oh, sod it. Who wants a photographic tour of my hovel bedroom?