This Monday evening, we headed to Ocean Youth Connexions in Limehouse. Task owner, Kamal greeted us there after we rang the small, but very mighty doorbell. Many thanks to Kamal for hosting us after a last minute cancellation. Before starting, we gathered in a the shape of a digestive which was apt, given that we soon introduced ourselves and our favourite biscuit. Bourbons, jammie dodgers, ritz, ginger nuts, hobnobs, Biscoff, French raspberry jaffa cakes, malted milks, Choco Leibniz, and others were mentioned. Great biscuit preference diversity within the Goodgym demographic.
As usual, there was a range of tasks to occupy us:

• Simon and Kim headed upstairs to tidy the offices there. Tidy seems too small a word as what they accomplished was a changing-rooms-esque transformation (without any tears).
• Darren, gave the front of the building a makeover. A lone worker at first, by the end this was where the party was at and he was joined happily by several others
• Jack, supported by Sam (and a ladder) got to work giving the backyard hedge a trim. This task came naturally to Jack given that his mum is a professional hairdresser.
  
• Kirsti , Ciarán, Chantal and Chloe did a mix of weeding and rubbish clearing in the back yard.
• * John and Jack got to work clearing the back-backyard.

An array of equipment was used to aid clearing: from litter pickers to broomsticks (the latter not just getting a mention here so that the report title makes sense...)

Shout out to Chantal for coming to her first task and getting stuck in the weeds, in a good way!

Congrats to Chloe for recently completing a milestone 10 tasks (this being her 11th)! A keen tennis player, Chloe has quickly established herself as a familiar and valuable member of the team - one could say she has 'set' the bar high for new joiners, always on the 'ball' and 'game' for all goodgym tasks.

This was a productive evening with many bags of rubbish cleared. Group photos taken, and a record number of shout outs and announcements announced, we said our goodbyes and went off in different directions.

Until the next time!

The Felix Project's Saturday morning session provided GoodGymers the option to either help in the kitchen or the warehouse. With Jack and Ciarán both never having attended a Felix Project session before, Ciarán assumed he should join the warehouse team while Jack was directed to join the kitchen team. This lead to a case of star-crossed GoodGymers, where although Jack and Ciarán were enjoying the company of the other non-GoodGym volunteers and staff members, they didn't actually see each other.

Luckily however, while Jack was on a quick break, he managed to spot Ciarán who was sorting through good and gone off carrots in his red GoodGym t-shirt. Crisis Averted! The two were finally able to introduce themselves and have a nice chat before getting back to work.

Ciarán, who had signed up to be the designated photo taker still managed to forget to take any photos, however, since he lives quite locally, he was able to grab a quick picture of the front entrance on his bike ride the following day.

A small but mighty group of runners met at Shoreditch High Street for the first of our borough‑wide leafleting routes to expand our reach to more community organisations.

We ambled across East London, stopping at a predetermined list of community organisations and food gardens along the way, dropping flyers and exploring parts of Tower Hamlets we didn’t even know existed.

Conditions were ideal: blue skies, a steady pace, and an impressive number of cats and dogs spotted en route. We made the most of the sunshine with a brief wander through Columbia Road Market, refuelling with coffees and matcha along the way.

Where we couldn’t find anywhere suitable to drop leaflets, Lucinda dutifully noted down contact emails for follow‑up. And while we weren’t sure whether this new initiative would pay off, by the end of the session we already had two referrals!

With five more routes still to leaflet, there’s plenty of opportunity to spread the word about GoodGym, drum up even more interest, and continue discovering new corners of Tower Hamlets along the way.

This was our latest-in-the-evening task since we were asked to tidy up after the never-ending Cranbrook party. Task owner Des had asked us the day before for a later start, because he had to come down from Yorkshire by boat, or something. And astonishingly all of our crowd played close attention: not one turned up an hour early...

Given the later start, there was little or no hope that the Ides of March would bring a daylight start, we’re two weeks away from a full moon, and our main searchlight-bringer wasn’t with us this week. I’ve got three head torches at home, but didn’t think about charging them until it was too late. Luckily, Emma and Martin did bring headlights, and Nia proved adept at pointing Des’s one light in a useful direction

But as we picked our way around the cramped premises, we somehow managed to achieve a lot. Basically, we shovelled a great deal of earth out of planters. And later shovelled it back in. It’s been suggested that paying people to dig holes and fill them up again can boost the economy, but our sequence included a middle bit I didn't mention: we inserted compost before replacing the top level of earth. Des insisted on me jumping up and down on the compost. I had no idea what was in it, but I wasn’t keen on taking it home on my On trainers.

Elsewhere on the estate, Martin, Dan, Kevin and Gabe were displaying their artistic talents, painting a four-sided bench which encloses a tree in an open and well-lit part of Parkview. In fact it looked to me as if the very luminous green paint being applied, was lighting up the whole estate. Task completed, the Fab Four turned to use their remaining paint to brighten a wall within the yard

All we had to decide after that, was where to take the group picture. Rejecting the yard as too dark, and the steps as lit too variably, we plumped for the circle-from-above option. Sensibly, we used Emma’s phone. Any accompanying pictures where you can actually identify individuals in the gloom, were taken by her. Any which are completely blurry and verging on pointless, are mine