How did a rosy start of the mission go down the toilet?

On a sunny Sunday afternoon, Sevan and Kash rolled their slightly battered bodies from Ealing to West Kensington. After a 9km run, none of them had fallen apart, which was a good sign, especially for Kash, who hadn’t done that distance in one go since late June.

Mrs J had two types of gardening tasks for GoodGymers: one at high altitude and another at ground level. Sevan, who took the first kind of the job as the taller person, was unsure how he was going to reach the rose bushes - or should I say trees - to deadhead them, four metres or so above the ground. Mrs J had an answer for that: a long-reach telescopic pruner, which she couldn’t wield herself. Kash, on the other hand, started spot weeding flower beds, then moved onto quite a peculiar task of kneading forget-me-nots. According to Mrs J, the carpet of forget-me-not plants kept a little fence around the beds up and kept the neighbours’ cats away from the flower beds. It made sense to Kash that soil obscured by creeping greenery wouldn’t resemble a litter tray anymore. That was a first hint of the toilet coming later into the picture.

After the first round of deadheading roses in the sky, Sevan swapped with Kash and helped her locate more flowers to prune. They worked just like a spotter and a sniper, taking down one rose after another. Quickly, they moved into trimming a tree, whose branches ventured into the neighbour’s territory despite a very tall fence. Kash, usually averse to precision work in a garden, enjoyed long-distance pruning so much she didn’t notice when Sevan cleared all the remaining weeds she had left behind and started bagging the trimmings.

Just when almost all the green waste was packed up, Mrs J surprised the GoodGymers with a question:

Would you be able to install a toilet seat?

The query was primarily aimed at Sevan, as Mrs J seemed to associate masculinity with the loo know-how. Sevan accepted the challenge and learned about Mrs J’s reckless relative after whose visit the toilet seat lost its structural integrity. While Kash entertained herself by stroking Mrs J’s cat and viewing the photos of Mrs J’s late beloved dog, Sevan quickly swapped the old, broken seat with a new one. Mrs J was very grateful for all the help in the garden and restroom.

Thank you so much for your help today - Mrs J
You can think about us while sitting comfortably on the new seat! - Sevan

Today's session for HANGOT had a surprisingly good start. There were 10 GoodGymers registered for the task, which was amazing in itself, including Will who made this is first GoodGym session. Welcome 👋🥳! Everyone also made it to HANGOT's secret undercover base on time and without getting lost. Amazing!

Once assembled, they walked to BlackBerry Corner, one of HANGOT's earliest orchards, with 20 apple trees and a long history of brambles, hence the name. As it was coming to the end of the growing season - for fruit and weeds - it was time to tidy up the orchard. Today's priorities were to:

1. Clear a ring around each apple tree to be free of weeds
2. Remove brambles and nettles from the paths
3. For completeness, cut down the open spaces too

The goal was to starve the ground of nutrients year after year to stunt and then eventually stop the weeds from growing back.

Work was divided up between the team with everyone grabbing a tool for their task. Shears, rakes, wheelbarrows, a pitchfork and a slasher were passed around. Working together, they made quick work of the most important jobs around the paths and trees.

At the same time, some of HANGOT's team were scything the open spaces, leaving lots to be raked up and moved to the distant compost heap. Will did a great job of raking throughout the task, which gave him a solid workout at his first session. A few others felt the fatigue in their muscles too by the end from chopping and slashing.

HANGOT were incredibly grateful that the huge GoodGym turnout had helped them complete all of the planned work. Their compost heap had also gone from zero to humongous, which will be really useful next year. There was even time for some to see their first quince tree fruiting and taking a chance on eating what they'd hand picked.

This morning was a great turn out for a Friday morning, where goodgymers from different areas (kingston,merton,richmond and ealing) joined the volunteers of The friends of Beverly Park to carry on clearing out the weeds around the roses. This is an ongoing project to get the Rose beds back to their former glory, with all their vibrant colours. Hats of to Sven for soldiering on after his fall in the Royal Park. Great progress was made and enjoyable as always when we all come together.

It's been a whole four months since Ealing Repair Cafe teamed up with GoodGym Ealing in June. After the summer break, Mary and Lone had a busy September, running events during Ealing Green Week. They were proud to share that they had been giving out the famous T-shirt drawstring bags with mini sewing kits attached, encouraging people to mend their clothes. Now, it was time to head to the hall of St Mary's Church in Acton to make new drawstring bags!

Tonight's session in numbers:

1st session for our newest addition to the team, Yulia, who was the bravest one and volunteered to tame the beast, the electric sewing machine, to sew new drawstring bags.
2 GoodGymers - Gaby and Maria - worked on a banner for ReActon, a new reuse and repair site in Acton, arranging letters made of ties on a massive piece of fabric, and then hand-sewing them to it.
3 other GoodGymers - Harvey, Steph and Kash - worked on a production line, cutting the fabric for bags, and threading yarn through them, basically everything to give everyone else their chance to sew.
5 runners coming from Ealing Broadway to Acton: Harvey, Maria, Sevan, Steph and Kash.
5 running t-shirts donated by Steph towards the drawstring bag effort - will his race t-shirt supply ever end? We don't think so!
10th collab session by Ealing Repair Cafe and GoodGym Ealing, marked by consumption of cakes and doughnuts brought by Mary and Lone.
17 letters traced and cut out by Sevan to create a banner advertising "Free school uniforms" - all made from... donated school uniforms beyond repair.
23 colourful drawstring bags, including one with Cher pattern, were the result of today's efforts, most likely going to be donated to the Northfields Community Library.

And, finally, a whole...
750 good deeds by Steph! Time flew by - we saw it coming, but Steph doesn't cease to surprise us with how much GoodGymming he's doing each month. Congratulations Steph!

Next week, we are running to St Mary's Church - this time in South Ealing - for an Autumn garden tidy-up. There will be a walking session from Ealing Broadway too - so sign up now!

A pallet packed with donated food for St Mary's Food Cupboard was already waiting in front of the church door for the early birds from the first volunteer shift. Wayne arrived just after 8am to open the door and let Kash, Roger and Gary unload the cartons with an abundance of exotic fruit: bananas, melons, limes, pineapples, and oranges.

Sevan came just in time to swap with Roger, and embarked on a task to sort oranges that had arrived in impressive quantities. He indentified the good, the bad, and the ugly citruses, and discarded the mouldy and the squashed ones.

Wayne and Gary tried to give out some of the oranges ahead of the afternoon distribution as there wasn't even enough space to display them. They offered fruit to the parents with children heading to the local school, yet, with not much success. Kash attempted only once to "sell" some surplus oranges, and found that the parents weren't very trusting to strangers - even the strangers emerging from the house of God. Ouch.

There was no better way to cope with such rejection than flattening cardboard boxes, carrying empty crates outside the church and energetic hoovering. Having conquered the slightly bad feeling with the power of good, Sevan and Kash finished the task and left the rest in the hands of the next shift of GoodGymers.

As Storm Amy approached Ealing, a whirlwind of West London GoodGymers landed at Horsenden Farm. A strong team of seventeen hasn't been seen in Ealing for a long time. It took the joint forces of Ealing, Hounslow and Richmond to build a do-good brigade so large that it surprised even the task owner, Elsa, who scrambled to find more tasks for them.

We welcomed two new joiners, Bernadette and Tom, who chose to kick off their GoodGym adventure dangerously close to the Gruffalo Trail at Horsenden Hill. With such an impressive team, the chances of being eaten by a Gruffalo were close to zero. At the same time, the odds of having fun with good company while getting active in nature before eating carb-heavy, cheesy goodness from a local bakery were very high!

Our regulars from the Hounslow group runs had a chance to welcome back the unstoppable Lucy after the break she had to take in the last couple of weeks. Great to see you again, Lucy!

Two of the tasks given by Elsa had a lot to do with the mysterious disappearance of Horsenden pigs. The first assignment, taken by Steph Ducat, Iram, Kymm and Gus, was to transfer hay from the broken-down hay bales to the former pig quarters and spread it on the ground. I chose to believe it was to secure the traces of a pignapping crime until the arrival of the forensics team. Steph described the effort as hay-way to hell as the gusts of wind kept blowing the hay out of the wheelbarrows. Kymm reported there were as many techniques to spread the hay as GoodGymers: from gleeful tossing, through grumpy kicking to methodical arranging.

Sevan and Bernadette had a task of clearing weeds, mostly nettles, near the Horsenden Loaf pizza oven. Sevan shared that they were setting the stage for the hog roast the following day. That shed some light on the disappearance of the pigs - they must have escaped when they heard about the whole hog roast enterprise!

The largest squad undertook a mammoth job of clearing brambles to expand a meadow where the farm cows could graze to help establish a grassland with plenty of wildlife on the slope of Horsenden Hill. Gaby, Ariane, Tom, Mairaj, Maxime, Afshin, Thaiza, Lucy and Kash were chopping, lopping or slashing the blackberry invaders while Anita and Ash raked away the cuttings.

The cherry on a cake was that all the activity was observed through the lens of photographer Laura, who did a great job of not interrupting our tasks while capturing the spirit of GoodGym and the beauty of Horsenden Hill. We are hoping our part-time modelling gig today will help spread the word about GoodGym in the coming months. It will probably also disclose our soft spot for Horsenden pizza!

Inspired by today's task? Join the Horsenden session next month! Sign up now!