Saturday 19th October
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Report written by Jer Boon
When these run reports are late appearing it's almost always because I'm suffering from pun paralysis! That is to say we're supposed to add a pithy headline, preferably involving a clever pun of some sort. Or at the very least add a headline of any kind at all.
And some days they just won't pop in to your head. GoodGym writers' block is a real thing, you know!
Embarrassingly, this time I went to an AI chatbot for help. "Give me an apple themed pun", I lamely asked of it.
"What do you call an apple that's been bitten? A half baked idea" it came up with. Half-baked indeed!
I pointed out that this was a joke, not a pun, and learning from its mistake the chatbot did indeed offer a (terrible) pun this time.
Encouraged by this I asked "give me a few puns to pick from" and, noticing my accidental punnage in this, added "do you see what I did there?"
Chatbot did indeed pick (sorry!) up on this and offered a few lame picking-related puns this time. But the work was done by now. My own creative juices (sorry!) were once more flowing. This was my story. My scoop. Chatbots have their place, they're out of the box now and they won't be going back ... but we must use them wisely - not as creators to do the creative work for us, but as a sounding board to help spark our own imaginations.
Back to the task. Grow For Life have an orchard next to the Walled Garden we all know and love. Being an orchard of course, it's rather low maintenance. So I never even knew it was there.
But today they've invited their fans and friends - and there were indeed dozens of people in attendance - to come along and help in picking some of the apples, and also joining in the full end-to-end process of washing and sorting, mashing, and pressing juice.
A proper old-fashioned community of real humans getting together to help each other do something good and get something dome. Chatbots will never be able to do that (he writes...)
A pressing task indeed...
Therapeutic horticulture to help people to who are suffering with anxiety, depression and isolation https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/charity-search/-/charity-details/5095294
See moreMon 21st Oct at 9:57am
Magnificant prose. :)