After a one-hour lunch break, the notorious Hanwell taggers Kash and Harvey returned to Elthorne Park to continue marking stall pitches for the upcoming Hanwell Carnival. This time, they were joined by Yonas, who had visited the park the previous week to help remove invasive burdock.

The final task of the day for the Carnival started — despite everyone's best efforts to keep the string used for marking rectangle sides tangle-free — with unravelling a long, knotted piece of twine. Fortunately, GoodGymers develop remarkable endurance for untangling strings, Christmas lights and bunting over the course of their volunteering careers, so the knotty challenge was soon overcome.

With the twine restored to working order, the three GoodGymers joined volunteers Sue and Mina for the main job. Rectangle sides were measured, angles checked and then double-checked, sections tagged, and the whole operation repeated for another cluster of stall pitches - all under the scorching sun.

Just when the team thought they were done for the day, they discovered there were two more rectangles left to mark out - and rather unusual ones. Unlike all the previous pitches, whose dimensions had been given in feet, these came in metres: 40m by 18m. That was quite a box to draw!

The continental European GoodGymers had no trouble switching from imperial to metric (in fact, the system made much more sense to them), and the team powered through the final two rectangles, squeezing the last drops from the spray cans to mark the lines on the grass. Luckily, those final boxes didn't need to be divided into smaller sections. Did the European rectangles come with their own Schengen areas? We'll never know.

Before long, the grass-marking operation was complete.

"You are magnificent." - Des, the task owner.

And after a full day of measuring, tagging and line-marking in the heat, nobody was going to argue with that assessment.

On Monday morning, a trio of GoodGymers helped unload the deliveries at the St Mary's food cupboard: the regular Martin, very active new joiners Yonas and Anna, and the honourable guest Afsar, who lives 6000 kilometres away from London, but loves GoodGym and always gets involved in many tasks every time he visits his family in Ealing. How amazing is that!

I am delighted to join GoodGym after two years gap and undertake the task at the food cupboard in South Ealing's St Mary Church. It's a wonderful task and to met with Goodgym team. - Raja Muhammad Afsar