This morning I had two furniture-moving missions in Hackney with the awesome Latoya. It's always great doing furniture moving missions with Latoya because she has insanely great spatial awareness skills. To make it even better, Latoya gave me a belated 200-good deed gift (200g of fudge being the magic number - I didn't share 😎✌️) Thanks, Latoya!

Our first mission was to help facilitate Mr L's release from hospital by moving a double divan base and mattress from his bedroom to a spare room. This will make some space in his bedroom for a hospital bed to be installed.

As with most Hackney missions, the most difficult part of the operation was in finding the flat. Hackney often seems to use the same building name for around 7-10 buildings on the same site, and the only way you know which one you need is to either be lucky enough to spot a map at the beginning (frequently only in one location), or to read the numbers off the side of the each building as you wander around. On this occasion, I managed to spot a map early on. This was especially lucky as today's flats also had a lot of scaffolding obscuring the numbers 😬

First hurdle cleared (finding the building), we then had to navigate our way past the rest of the common pitfalls for flat finding: We checked which floor the flat was on, picked the elevator that went to that floor, (not all elevators serving every floor), and worked out what quantum fluctuating version of an ascending number scale they'd decided to use for the flat numbers on that particular floor (At one point, I walked into what appeared to be a store cupboard, and just looked at it for about 10 seconds, confused as to why it wasn't the flat we were looking forward 😵 Latoya found this very amusing for some reason.)

Having finally located the flat and introduced ourselves to Mr L's relative and to his occupational therapist, we moved the double bed and a small hall table in double quick time. Just 10 minutes after our start time, we were already making our goodbyes to Mr L's relative and OT.

But we did not say goodbye to each other!! Oh, no: With less than two hours until our next Hackney mission together, we did what all GoodGymmers do in this sort of situation and ambled to a nearby café for cake/breakfast (these terms being interchangeable to some people (me)).

Over to Latoya for part II...