A foodbank that has served the East Yorkshire town of Goole and its surrounding villages for 16 years is closing its doors, citing rising costs and a drop in donations - a combination roughly as sustainable as trying to fill a bathtub with the drain open.

The Mission Trinity Foodbank began as part of the local Methodist church's mission to help homeless people and those facing financial hardship. Founder David Sample summed up the situation with the weary clarity of someone who has watched the numbers go the wrong way for a while: "Over time our funds have declined and declined, to the point where we can't really afford to keep going much longer, and also because of this cost of living crisis that's going on at the moment."

The charity, which supports about 50-60 families and individuals each week, has been buying in food up to three times a week to keep up with demand despite the drop in donations. "We've had to go out and buy more food with our funds, so we've been spending an awful lot more just to keep the basics in," Sample said - which is what happens when demand goes up, donations go down, and the laws of arithmetic remain stubbornly uninterested in charity.

Personal circumstances also played a part. Sample was originally employed by the church to run the foodbank, but since being made redundant he has been running it as a volunteer - a sentence that somehow manages to be both admirable and a quiet indictment of the whole arrangement.

The foodbank will continue to run until January, giving the community a few more months of the service it has relied on for the better part of two decades.

Sample described his time at the foodbank as a "rollercoaster," with some "stressful times" alongside heart-warming moments. "We've encountered people struggling with grief and their world falling in around about them, and they've come to us for help," he said. "We've done what we do and a couple of years later, they've been back and brought us stuff, so it's been very good that way."

He thanked all the "unbelievable" volunteers who have supported the foodbank over the years, and said he would be "happy" if someone came forward to take on the project - though any successor would need to find new funding streams to keep it operating, which is the charitable equivalent of being handed the keys to a car with no engine.

In the meantime, the headlines alongside this story - "I needed to use a food bank after graduating - now I want to end the stigma," "Donations help restock foodbank after severe shortages," and "'It's eye opening how many working people need our food bank'" - form a tidy little trilogy about the state of things, which we'll leave sitting here without further comment.