Another weedy street in Southville, another Tuesday evening opportunity for GoodGym Bristol to get stuck in!

Having opted out of glyphosate all year, some of the Southville gutters and pavements are very weedy which can also lead to blocked drains, so manual effort to keep the rainwater flowing is the order of the day.

Sweeping and scraping, a little bit if hacking and the longest, clumpiest piece if weed ever, lots of chat and the odd cat, many gutters and wall edges were all spruced up by the time we were due to run (or walk) away again.

Lits of lively chat sat outside at Workout and then a blast of DIYSOS getting a lorry stuck and the successfully pulling it out - jeopardy indeed.

See tiu all for more next week!

"A calm attitude will disarm your enemy"

A perfect chance to show Southville a bit of love around the primary school whilst all the kids are away. It was quite weedy when we arrived but we had many-a fantastic tool for scraping, digging, slashing and hoe-ing (not to be confusing with Christmas-time Ho, Ho, Ho-ing) before sweeping and brushing sooo many weeds and a huge amount of dust into waste sacks.

Russ joined us as he's visiting the UK before his next stint back in Tokyo so it was konnichiwa sensei (こんにちは せんせい for those of us who've spent a lot of time TRYING to learn hiragana), hes always full of enthusiasm and makes the rest of look a teeny bit "less enthusiastic", there was excellent squat-weeding from Cameron, Caroline and Richard, who'd already skillfully led the running group to the right place. Hoe-wielder Rach made sure there was enough for sweeping specialist Frances who showed great skills with the long and short brush, despite the steps/edge always being in the wrong place whilst Jason tidied AND took photos and Vaguely Northern Darren went all Zen and meditative sat cross-legged on the kerb.

Not boiling hot, not actually raining, just productive weather for a productive crack-team of Bristol GoodGymmers to help their community and spread cheer through Southville's streets. And a lot of talk about ineffective spies, obviously.

It was full-on Bristol after a weekend of Harbour Festival loveliness to see hot air balloons back in the sky with the International Balloon Fiesta a few weekends away (and a cancellation of Ashton Court parkrun - you've been warned!). The general GoodGym rule of "see balloon, must point" was well-practised by the group of 5 walkers and 7 runners who'd joined forces to help clear some Southville Ward streets of weeds and save them from Bristol Waste's glyphosate.

Roddy found us by searching for the red t-shirts, Frances caught us up by searching for the right red t-shirts (there's no pulling the wool over Frances' eyes) and we all found the wheelbarrow of tools and made a plan after only five or so minutes chatting.

We were soon tacking the weeds on Murray Street, off Catherine Mead Street (not necessarily names after this Catherine Mead, but she's in the Academy of Cheese so deserves the name-check), Cameron making great in-roads beyond the parked car and Tom (named after the first King of Croatia, obviously) was a pro with the long-handled weeder-knife-thing, putting Vaguely Northern Darren's short-handled weeder-knife-thing to shame. Roddy was great at scooping up the piles of weeds and dusty dirt pulled out and swept up by the assembled mass of GoodGymmers.

Despite what the photos might suggest, Richards B and G worked really hard, too and Caroline, Jason and Helen seemed to have a race to fill the bin bags as quickly as possible so we soon ran out of official bin bag space and resorted to domestic bags.

All the bags were moved to the normal Bristol Waste pick-up spot, where we took credit for a number of green bags already there, Bristol waster will be thoroughly confused as we'd used clear (recycling) bags for the green waster and some of the green (non-recyclables) bags were blatantly full of drinks cans and bottles. Such a dilemma!

A great, if once again slightly warm, evening, finishing with a drink by the harbour at Workout where Caroline had a HUGE jug of oat milk with her pot of tea, we established everyone's birth month except Frances who protects her privacy with aplomb, and wished Ed well on his adventures to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow for his wardrobe-enhancing volunteering stint (and he's no longer on the naughty step, if anyone's asking).

See you all next week?

Southville Ward have opted out en masse from the Bristol Waste glyphosate "opportunities" so are choosing the weed by hand rather than obliterate the gutters and gaps on their roads. Many of the roads have group of residents able and willing to help with this initiative but some are struggling so GoodGym Bristol jumped at the chance to help out. Even though it was blisteringly hot.

With walkers from Workout and others meeting us at the task, we were soon hard at it (well, gently and calmly dissuading the weeds from their temporary locations) with scrapers, hackers, slicers and brooms all playing their part. In the shade.

With frequent swaps and slops (of water to drink), we soon moved from Warden Road across to Church Lane, by some sheltered housing and private housing. So much grass, dandelions, other-weeds-we-don't-know-the-names-of and a few stones/rocks. Honestly, only a few rocks. They just felt extra heavy in the heat.

With a final sweep (both visually and physically), we were on our way with a secret stop/mutiny to ASDAl's frozen treats aisle to choose a pack of 4 fake Cornettos in mint and another 4 in salted caramel, the wrappers were off as soon as the "Your Payment is Approved" banner appeared on the screen. With only 6 of us eating the ice-creams we than had the surprisingly difficult task of giving away two Cornetto-equivalents - one to a now-happier security guard and the other to the SIXTH person we tried - how is Bristol not snapping up the offer of a free Cornetto?

Fingers crossed for a cooler one next week, off to Hebron Burial Ground with it's extremes-of-weather reputation...

30 degrees. Not just one of my favourite triangle angles, the temperature at the 6.30 set-off for GoodGym Bristol with Plan C - a gentle litter pick to remove the mess left by people "enjoying" the very hot weather.

Armed with litter pickers, bags and ice-creams from the lovely lady who delayed her journey home to reopen her ice-cream van for us, we wandered around shady (as in not-in-the-sun, not less salubrious) areas of Harbourside, designing the ice-cream network for Bristol's on demand, multi-flavour on-tap cooling system. Just normal stuff.

Ice cream van, litter plan, can we catch the rubbish man? Sunshine, can of wine, should the sun have a curfew time? Litter pickers, bags are full, sweat in places no one should, time to go, drinking time, I can’t take it anymore…