Remember the DeLorean from Back to the Future leaving behind burning trails? Today's Ealing group run was like no other: with flames, time travel and all that jazz! Peter from IMPACT Theatre, a Perivale-based charity that promotes a positive image of disability through participation in performing and creative arts, had to change our initial painting task due to safety reasons. It was not our safety that was compromised.

"Kim is manic about health and safety", he said.

Peter and Kim had a problem with a storage room containing an electric switchboard and potentially flammable materials. That combination does go well together unless you are Guy Fawkes. Peter took Sevan, Steph Ducat and Kash on a remarkable journey through time. Their job was to dispose of flammables at different periods in history.

The first step took the GoodGymers back to 2020, the time of the raging pandemic with its iconic facemasks and social distancing screens. Peter had packed that COVID legacy into time-travelling trolleys and led Steph, Sevan and Kash further back in time. The voyage took them to the changing rooms in the Perivale Club, which were forever stuck in the fifties with classic painted wooden boards on the walls and the air of antiquity.

The next stop landed the team back in the theatre, in the 1910s. The storage room with the flammable materials contained some memorabilia of the silent film era, including the Charlie Chaplin photo as his famous Tramp character. Peter asked the GoodGymers whether they knew what connected the renowned comic actor to one of the towns in the Borough of Ealing. Charlie Chaplin lived in the Hanwell Community Centre which was back then a boarding school for poor children. None of us expected to go as far as the Victorian times!

Peter told us another story related to Hanwell Community Centre: about a pioneer aviator who built an aircraft inside the centre's vast cellars, but then died. According to Peter, the basement in Hanwell Community Centre can be quite an eerie place where you wouldn't want to be left alone. No wonder why - plenty of ghosts seem to reside there!

The memory of the basement in the Hanwell Community Centre sparked Sevan's and Kash's memories of the series of GoodGym sessions to paint the ceiling out there and transform the cellar into a music venue, which it is today. It was back in the summer of 2022 and Steph was not yet born as a GoodGymer.

Nearly three years later, in 2025, the task of removing flammable materials in the IMPACT Theatre was complete. The time continuum was not (at least not visibly) disturbed and the storage room was now safe. Nice work, time heroes!

Next week, at the Tuesday group run we are revisiting the Lammas Orchard in Ealing Broadway where there is always an infinite amount of woodchip that needs spreading!