Today, the Ampthill Square Tenants and Residents Association held a fête to celebrate 100 years of council housing and 50 years since the final tower block was completed on their estate. As part of the celebrations, they put on a series of entertainment throughout the day, including face painting, dancing lessons, debates on housing, meet and greets with police and fire services, and a bouncy castle (we firmly believe that the debates should have been held in here). Haringey task force member Sarah was helping to run the fête, and offered GoodGym's help to keep things running smoothly.

Aside from Sarah, Beth, Sally, Rita, and Elizabeth all helped at various points throughout the day. Their most important duty was to reverse the roles on the paparazzi by tailing the event photographer and making sure that consent forms had been duly completed by everyone snapped 🤓

Of course, the GoodGymmers were also keen to be distracted by all of the festivities available: Oversized deck chairs were sat in, boomerangs of newly learnt dance moves were made (writer's note: please don't watch the GoodGym Haringey Instagram story 😬), horns were tooted (mostly the cop-car-kind), faces were painted, and the owner of a lost earring was found. The fire truck was also extremely popular for some reason... 😏

These distractions made it pretty easy for us to occasionally lose the photographer (it was as simple as an "Ooooh! What's that over there?! 😃😃😃"). The photographer was obviously used to herding cats and/or small children however, as he managed to keep on finding us and putting us back on track again (it's possible that the fact that we travel in a gaggle of red t-shirts helped with this).

Around 3:30-ish, the photographer called it a day, and we spent the last hour or so of the community mission alternating between chatting with each other, telling people what GoodGym's about, and eating free cake. To be honest, this is what GoodGymmers for fun do when they're not physically at GoodGym: Call it a GoodGym state of mind. The remaining GoodGymmers also narrowly avoided a "fête" worse than death after an open invitation to sing on the stage was issued (we hid near a tree). All in all, a successful community mission! 😄🎉

ED: Sarah dropping in here to say this is my first experience as a Task Owner rather than Task Do-er and I want to use my admin privilege to say a huge thank you to Beth, Sally, Rita and Liz. Yesterday was a huge and stressful day for me and you were a huge help, both with the event and keeping me sane, even after I got stung by a wasp!! I saw how much the local community enjoyed and got involved yesterday and you were a huge part of making that possible.