This week it was a return to the Brown Books shop for another session pushing this community bookshop one step closer to re-opening.

On the way there, David and Chrisshane worked together on Chrisshanes week 4 of Couch to 5k, doing a loop with four 5 minute runs with walking rests in between. Chrisshane is doing fantastically at building her running stamina!

Completing the run on arrival at the shop the rest of the gang were hard at work sorting the space out. All the books and other stuff had arrived from storage and needed putting out on shelves. Masking tape needed peeling, paint splashes on the floor needed scrubbing up and the whole floor mopped clean of all the building grime from the last week.

We soon transformed the shop from what looked like a junk shop of piles of boxes and bits, into a clean, spacious area ready to be arranged to entice readers in to browse the books.

Stormy weather prompted a change of task this week as we were scheduled to paint dugouts at the 61 Football Club, but instead we went for indoor painting as the refurbishment of the Brown Books community bookshop nears completion.

On arrival, we swept up after the carpenters and had a quick workout using paint cans and sharing physio exercise tips for building knee strength.

We had yellow and green paint to apply to different parts of the walls so we got the rollers going and began the transformation from stark white.

We didn't quite get it all finished but made a good dent in it, ready to finish off next time around!

The GoodGymers were once again back helping Browns Books with set up before their opening. Today the team were tasked with alphabetising (if that’s even a word) all the shelved books. There were some interesting titles amongst them and we occasionally found ourselves reminiscing and laughing over some of the old school books and annuals in the collection.

What an interesting way to spend a couple of hours on a Friday afternoon. With time on our hands, three of us met up at Luton Point to help with the next chapter of Brown Books' move into their new premises. Today's tasks was all about shelves. The shelves had been cleaned and places around the shop and our next job was to start sorting through the boxes and bags of books and organise the books by genre. It was incredible to see the variety of books that make up the stock. And some of the older books had us reminiscing about times when we had read them. Before long we had the shelves filled with thrillers, romance, sci-fi, fantasy, history, cooking and a whole lot more. And it was lovely seeing all the children's novels and picture books too. Apologies to Gail as she left before the group photo, but our literary trio did a great job. Well done.

Brown Books had been flooded out by faulty plumbing from the flat above and there was so much damage they needed to pack up the salvageable stock ready for a move to new premises next week. So of course GoodGym offered our services to help with the packing. We had no idea how many books there would be, and as we soon ran out of boxes, while Musa carried on packing with help from our ally Hussain, Gill and Omar took turns to go in search of more cardboard boxes: we begged them from other shops and even went diving into recycling bins to retrieve flattened boxes which were then reconstructed back at the shop. Laura joined us and was soon busy packing up great works of literature including a lot of play scripts.

2 and a half hours later, with a mountain of 📚 book boxes 📦 piled up in the centre of the shop, we’d had an intensive upper body workout. With no more boxes available the lights were switched off and Gill locked up

It was a nice afternoon for a stroll around the Stockwood Park area for two GoodGymers. We met at Lawn Path and discussed the task; Yazed had not done leafletting before and added the words “leaflet” and “flyer” two his understanding of English. We soon got into the swing of it, and were “leap frogging” along the road to get our bundles of leaflets posted in record timing. Several residents were keen to hear about the Lutn Literary Festival being sponsored by Browns Books. Everything went smoothly until towards the end, I went to post a leaflet in a post box on some very large sinister looking gates. Yazed had sensibly stayed well back while I nearly jumped out of my skin as the feet of two very large dogs came grabbing towards me from under the gate accompanied by some very loud barking. I can only apologise to Yazed that I may have added another word to his lexicon of English which will not be repeated here!

I may need to get a hodoie like Yazed’s but it would need to say Fear of Dog instead