When I arrived at Mr M's door this afternoon ready for some chair building, he introduced himself by his first name, and said that's what I should call him - not Mr M, nor Mr Surname, or any other combination.

He showed me the two (large) boxes in his somewhat narrow hallway, and asked how long he'd got me for - I said I was there to get both chairs built, which was clearly the right answer based on his gratitude and the promise of a can of coke at any point.

Fortunately both chairs were reasonably straightforward to construct, and had all the requisite parts, tools and instructions - not for the first time the constraint was the lack of space in the hallway, but after building chair 1, and moving this into Mr M's living room, there was enough room to build chair 2, which Mr M said would stay in the hallway for now whilst he made space in one of the other rooms for it.

I gave both chairs a quick test drive - the recliner (with built in leg rest) was remarkably comfortable...Mr M was very grateful for my efforts, and doubly so when I said I'd take all the empty boxes downstairs to his bin store. The cold can of coke was well earned.

Last night GoodGym Westminster combined food rescue with community outreach. The evening started with an unexpected bonus – bumping into Brenda on her way to Gail's! After a quick hello, I headed off to Hyde Park to meet Khai, and together we ran back to reunite with Brenda outside Gail's Bakery for GoodGym Westminster's first food rescue from this location.

There was a little bit of confusion to begin with but once we'd cracked the issue, we successfully rescued three bags of perfectly good food that would otherwise have gone to waste.

Our next stop was to meet Under One Sky, a charity that supports people experiencing homelessness by providing essential items, food, hot drinks and compassionate outreach. Their volunteers head out onto the streets to build trusted relationships with rough sleepers, offering practical help alongside signposting to longer-term support services. In Westminster, where rough sleeping remains one of the biggest challenges facing the borough, organisations like Under One Sky provide a vital lifeline for people who are often isolated and in crisis.

The second challenge of the evening was finding the team, who were already on the move with their trolley full of food and hot drinks! After a bit of tracking them down, we caught up, handed over the rescued goodies, and had a great chat about making this a regular Tuesday evening partnership.

Our collaboration that ticks every box: delicious food is rescued instead of being wasted, and it reaches people who can really benefit from it the very same evening.

No food waste, more people fed - a real win-win.

🌍 LSE Summer School x GoodGym #3

Once again, running has proven it has the power to bring people from different cultures together. Denzel the GoodGym run leader took students from New York, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Denmark & Belgium through the streets of London.

This was the 3rd of the LSE Summer School x GoodGym group run series, ongoing until mid August.

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Once again, all of us meet outside of The World Turned Upside Down globe where everyone got acquainted before we got into our warm ups. With the weather being a bit cooler, it made the run a lot easier. The team found out very early on that running through central London in the afternoon can be a bit of a challenge so I gave them tips on how to navigate the busy streets safely.

The run reached it's more enjoyable stage once we reached Green Park. A good number of the team wanted to find good running spots in central so running through Green Park was like finding gold to them. As we enjoyed not having to swerve in and out through groups of people, we eventually ended up at Buckingham Palace. Unfortunately the front of the gate was very busy and the group wanted to finish in time to watch the England match, so I made sure to get a picture for them where we could get a lot of Buckingham Palace in the background.

From there we ended up running down The Mall, a very iconic running spot as it's where the finish line is for the London Marathon. This lead to a whole conversation about marathons in general and who would actually run one. We were happy to find out that Johannes and Elias have both already run a marathon, both in under 4 hours.

We soon reached Westminster where everyone got to see the iconic red phone booth, it was a big surprise for them to find out that modern Londoners don't actually use them anymore. Everyone got their cameras out when we reached the Big Ben, everyone knew it would be big but the actual size was a big surprise. The team were then blessed with another great central running route, a straight line down from Westminster to Temple near the Thames. The route only had a small amount of crossings and there's a lot of space for groups to run through without disturbance.

Now we've reached the final stretch where we ran up a hill in Strand before taking a short route back to LSE. The team all had a good amount of running experience so the distance wasn't a problem, plus they really enjoyed getting to explore London properly. I took the team through some cool down stretches then we parted ways to go watch the England match. Another successful run.

A Monday afternoon visit for Mrs S, and it was a warm one in central London. As we ran down the list, she got stuck on the type of pasta that's a bit thicker than spaghetti, and between us we threw out all known variations of pasta until we finally arrived at linguine...thankfully the Waitrose at John Lewis had exactly what she wanted on the pasta front, and pretty much everything else too bar a couple of items - I was offered a glass of water with the recently bought elderflower cordial in it by way of post walk refreshment, which hit the spot perfectly.

A cooler Monday afternoon walk from Mr R's front gate to Tesco and back with the now very familiar list and reusable bag in hand - I played a little memory game of picking items without referring to the list, and nearly got a full house, just the tin of prunes caught me out...

One of Gurseva's regular volunteers cooked up a storm on Saturday, so everyone was treated to kidney bean soup, potatos and mixed veg alongside the regular veggie rice.

There was lots of food to give out so we could be generous with the portions. There were a lot of compliments about the food!