Our Mission this afternoon was to tidy up a bit in a lovely back garden in Tooting. It was Alice’s first ever Mission (Raa!!) and she’d come all the way from Hammersmith to do it as well, nice one!!

There were a host of fruits and flowers there including pears, cherries, lavender, roses, and lovely orange lilies. There to enjoy this fantastic variety of different pollen were a nice lot of bees, butterflies and other little flying monsters. 🐝🦋 A feature that seemed less predictable than the nice flora and fauna was the weightlifting gym that also resided out there. The equipment included a bench with Olympic weights, a punch bag, medicine balls and kettle bells (plus an enormous bit of rope?)

Ordinarily it could have been nice to mess around with the equipment a bit, but the weather meant just pulling up weeds was plenty exercise to get us all sweating.

We worked down the bed on one side of the garden (mercifully the side shaded by the fence) weeding amongst the nice plants. Four bags of waste later and following a break and chilled drink from our sweet host Mrs. R, there was one last thing added to the list… A bush that had established itself, but then died now needed digging-up.
The branches were easy to snap off to reduce the spikiness of it and get closer, but some committed forking and spading from several of us (including standing on the fork to try to prise it up) was still not enough and we had to concede...

Gladly we did get some use out of the gym equipment, if only momentarily - as Mrs. R thanked us and showed us the way out, Karen gave the punchbag a quick jab to settle the score after our defeat at the hands of that stubborn shrub. 🥊