Back once again! At Sydney Gardens, for a festive session before Christmas and or last visit before the end of 2025.

Five GoodGymmers rocked up, some festive, some not, (some forgot), and our task today was to lay wood chip on the flower beds adjacent to Park entrance to the Holburne Museum. Cosmo, Aaron, Bennath, Nev and Meyrick were on hand to help the Friends of Sydney Gardens, who were busy removing leaves from the aforementioned flower beds in order to prepare them for our wood chip./

Roughly in keeping with the usual algorithm that the heavier the material, the further away from where it is needed, wood chip is fairly light, so we only needed to barrow it about 10 yards from where we refilled.

There was a bit of urgency towards the end, as we really needed to finish the beds before the hour was up, but we made it.

Many thanks to the Friends of Sydney Gardens, who invited us for cake and mulled wine in the Pavilion afterwards.

It’s been a while since I’ve come home from a GoodGym mission and immediately dived into a bath to get clean but it’s kind of appropriate since we were helping out at the former open air swimming baths in Bath.

The UK’s only surviving Georgian lido closed in 1984 but reopened in 2023 after a long campaign. Sadly, four months later flooding caused major damage and it has not been able to operate since. But there is hope that repairs will go ahead.

GoodGym was called into help keep the site looking spick and span and, while volunteers from the Cleveland Pools Trust were in charge of clearing undergrowth, Paul, Cosmo, Meyrick and I had the job of clearing the mud that had built up on site.

We removed buckets and buckets of the stuff. And, unlike the hippopotamus’ opinion in the old Flanders and Swann song, it was anything but glorious. It was gloop. It was sludge. It oozed. We got covered in it.

But it was a wonderful feeling to know we were helping such an important part of Bath’s leisure and heritage. We will be back!