At the stroke of 12, I met up with Rupesh for a mission in Islington for Mr L. [Technically I bumped into Rupesh about 8 minutes previous to this, and he ended up joining me on a great toilet hunt (the key on a local map was a bit dodgy - see photos). This is unimportant to the following narrative - I just wanted to share the dodgy map key.]

Mr L is recovering from a knee operation that he had last year. He's been trying to clear up his house and garden, but has been finding it difficult to get through it all. GoodGym were called in to help tidy his garden to help with this.

As soon as Mr L opened his door, he told us that disaster had struck: While trying to open the back door to his rear garden, the key had snapped off in the lock! Unfortunately, Mr L hadn't been able to remove the key (or the lock) before our arrival. However, Rupesh and I were still keen to work and so decided to focus on the front garden instead.

The front garden was pretty overgrown with weeds. However this just meant that it didn't require any brainwork, leaving us free to chat about a variety of topics. Lots of the chat centred on Snapchat filters (some of the GG Barnet crew were using the gender swap filter while on a night out yesterday), and Bruce Lee (we'd spotted a Bruce Lee statue in Mr L's living room at the beginning of our mission).

Rupesh had apparently gone to Hong Kong a few years ago and posed with a Bruce Lee statue while wearing a Bruce Lee t-shirt, so he and Mr L are obviously two of a kind. Given that, I condescended enough to allow Rupesh to name some Bruce Lee movies that I could base my pun on, which is probably the closest I've ever allowed someone to have creative control over my run reports. I also allowed him to help me create a "Fist of Fury" photo with some furze to accompany the pun (it may have led to me to utter the memorable line of "Stay there Rupesh! I need to get your fist in!" There was lots of giggling at this (my ribs hurt only marginally less than if Bruce Lee had gone full fury mode on me)). Rupesh, you're welcome 😄😜

After 8 bags worth of weeding (and a brief orange juice break provided by Mr L), Rupesh sprayed around some weedkiller while I gathered the bags of garden waste together. As we were making our goodbyes, we found out that three of Mr L's lightbulbs had blown. Knowing it was a 5 minute job, and that Rupesh would do all of the work, we were happy to shimmy up the ladder and get this done before heading off into the sunset.

Great working with you Rupesh! Thank you for applying such a flattering filter to our faces (hopefully my man-mullet won't scare people too badly!), enjoy your next mission & see you at the GoodGym Barnet community mission tomorrow.