A POETIC charity worker has helped her staff win a coveted award.

Age Concern shop manager Janet Wilson, (pictured, centre) who runs a store on Golden Hill Lane, Leyland, near Preston, wrote a poem to nominate her staff in a national competition to find the charity's best volunteers.

And Janet, who is in charge of 17 charity workers, beat off competition from hundreds of store managers across the country, to have her workers pronounced Age Concern National Volunteer Team of the Year.

Janet, of Bristol Avenue, Farington, said: "Requests for entries were sent out to every outlet of Age Concern. We had to write either 10 lines of verse or no more than 100 lines of prose. So I thought that 10 lines of a kind of limerick would be better."

In her poem Janet describes her staff as the greatest people she knows. She wrote: "They're reliable, keen, always giving a hand. That's why I can say -- here's the best team in the land."

Janet and her team will be presented with a special certificate and £100 today (Thursday) at the shop by the charity's head of retail. Janet said: "They deserve it and work very hard. I think a lot about my volunteers and I was inspired by them. They really are every line of that verse.