Good Cheer

Welcome to Joseph and Mark who joined us for the first time tonight. It was also great to celebrate not one but two GoodGym birthdays: 🎉HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATT AND LAURA!🎉

A puzzling task

Alice D did a wonderful job leading a group to Emmaus on her inaugural run leading evening. At Emmaus, the group met Xanne who explained their tasks for the evening and set them to work around the warehouse. The group got to work sorting donations to find the weirdest items and figuring out puzzles, including puzzling their way through subbuteo (thank goodness, or else what would the pun title have been).

Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed to Cherry Tree Garden. Julia set us to work on cutting back the overgrown areas, pruning a tree back to life and weeding the flower areas. The group split into half so while half of the group channeled their inner-Charlie Dimmocks, the rest of the group went to Victoria Park to do hill reps. We swapped over halfway through and the overall conclusion was that the group definitely prefer gardening to hills. After half an hour, the area was looking remarkably better and we had filled 5 garden waste bags.

A little pick-me-up

We finished the night with a team relay including a carrying-your-teammate round, with tactics ranging from piggy-backs to queen's chairs. Georgia's team raced home and were crowned victorious.

We headed off to celebrate with Laura and Matt and a double dose of chocolate cake, as well as celebrate Jenny's Bristol-cake win from the weekend and Darren's belated cheese-chasing medal!

It was great to have Simon, Martha, Miriam and Maria join us for the first time tonight! We treated them with a game of Whoosh to get warmed up (I promise our warm-ups are not normally that mentally challenging) then split into our two groups.

A bunch of us headed off, navigating our way through the Extinction Rebellion protest, to St Werburgh's City Farm Gardens. We met Sarah and Emily who had a whole host of tasks for us to get stuck into. We split into groups and swarmed off around the gardens, weeding all of the paths, cutting back overgrown bushes and trees, removing bindweed from the grounds, watering plants and turning compost. In just 30 minutes, the group did an amazing job of getting all of this manual work done - apparently the compost alone would have taken the team two weeks!

While our trusty clan of barrow-returners went off to the farm, the rest of the group were lucky enough to have a Lunge Off in their two teams. Who knew there was quite such a height difference in the group until this challenge?!

A marrow-thon effort

Meanwhile, Maria led a group up the steep hill to Bramble Hill Farm. They were met by Kim and Adi, our youngest GoodGym helper. They all set to work with various tasks around the farm. This was mainly taking photos of the pigs, but also included lots of weeding, watering of the veg, collecting eggs from the chicken, post-bashing and bindweed removal. Their hard work was rewarded by getting to pick and take home some massive courgettes. Queue the marrow puns...

A marrow escape

They finished all of this just in time to pull themselves away from the hilltop view of a hot air balloon-filled dusky Bristol and make a run for it down the hill, newly equipped with some summer squash. After cooling off and discussing Darren's rocker days over Ross's delicious birthday macaroons (thanks Ross!), the only other key subject on the cards was this week's menu because...

Tomarrow's dinner is courgette to be decided

No pun credit is taken by the author: thank you to Gary, Mel, Clem and Richard.

43 GoodGymers gathered for our monthly visit to help Felix Road Adventure Playground tonight. It was great to have Caroline and Phoebe join us for the first time, and also lovely to see that we hadn't scared GoodJim off as he joined us for his second time.

Are you a parking ticket? 'Cos you've got fine written all over you

(Thanks for your top chat-up lines Alice) We got warmed up with a game of 'Squat if you...' (technical term) while a Parking Attendant watched over us. We quickly headed off so as not to get booked and jaunted along the Bristol Bath Cycle Path to the task.

While I mastered our groups, everyone else took part in the Mexican Squat Wave (are your legs tired yet?). Then we split into teams to cover the list of tasks which they needed help with.

• The staple removers continued the slow but satisfying job while perfecting their knowledge of which tool worked on each individual staple and nail type so that the Adventure Playground can paint the inside of the centre
• The waterers scattered buckets and hoses all the way round the playground to help the dry grass and the strawberries after our recent hot days
• The litter-pickers got to work on the ever-requested job of the playground and spread themselves around the large area to clear up two bags of rubbish
• The heavies got to work playing pallet tetris to get the pallets in a safer and more condensed position and removed four buckets of rubble and nails from the area.

In between all of this, the group still had time to practice their hula-hooping, do some laps of the velo-swing and send an teddy bear on a BMXing adventure.

Half an hour later, we hopped it back to Queen Square where we took part in my SUPER FUN fitness session for the night of partner jump overs and crawl unders. I have now been informed that it is, in fact, just fun.

Centurifun

Behind the scenes and to my ignorance, the wonderful group had been working up lots of surprises for my 100th Good Deed. After donning the Centurion outfit we were presented with Richard's latest addition to the Centurion outfit Hornycorn (or latterly, Horny Shona). Alice had then crafted a congo which we did much to the bemusement of people gathered in Queen Square for an evening of peace.

After all of this, we headed to Turtle Bay for this month's Eats and Claire's delicious cake. Thank you to Clo for organising!

Now all that was left to be asked was...

Did anyone order a ginger beer?

The morning's torrential rain cleared up for us to have our first non-rainy run in weeks. It was great to have James, Lee, Sam, Briony, Jim, Rachael join us for the first time tonight - we look forward to seeing you again soon!

The group split in half to cover two tasks tonight. Mel tackled her injury to lead a team of 16 to Hannah More Primary School. There, Caretaker Bob provided them with brand new pitchforks to turn all of the bark in the extensive playground. It was a large area but the team managed to cover it all and even had time to practice their monkey skills and unearth some ancient dinosaurs. All in an evening's work.

Crate expectations

Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed for a long-awaited return to East Bristol Foodbank. They had their most recent supermarket collection today with 1.7 tonnes of food. Andy from the food bank had set up the sorting room ready for us when we arrived.

A little less concencrate-ion, a little more action

Most of the group quickly got to sorting all of this food into different categories ready to be made into food parcels. With Chris's efficient technique of a sorting station and food-category runners, the pace of the group increased dramatically and they got through all of the crates set aside for us and more.

All creatures crate and small

Meanwhile, the Hardcore Group set to hoovering and sanitising all of the crates to prevent any unwanted furry visitors to the store. With their efficient work they got through all the crates just in time for our return run.

After a short detour for a Four Minute 🍑 Blast (which everyone will be feeling tomorrow) we got back to Queen's Square to celebrate Chris's completion of his 250th Good Deed - massive well done Chris! We celebrated with the now traditional Vienetta and the cake he brought, which was so unbelievably delicious that we will forgive him for not baking it himself and getting it through some dodgy black-market deals.

Title pun credit to Matt 🦕