Part Two of our Saturday Community Mission double took us back to Brook Green. Eight of us were signed up for both tasks - so Cookie led the way up the Thames Path for the second half of the challenge, with the rest of us following behind at various speeds, and Jess whizzed ahead on wheels.

Donatella from Friends of Brook Green welcomed us back, and we were joined by a few other local volunteers, Biscuits and Analiese (for her first good deed since March!). The job on hand for today was to get working on what can only be described as a big mound of mud. What with the dry weather of late, Donatella needed some muscle power to hack away at the hump and then use the soil to line the tennis court gardens ready for planting.

Jonny C went straight for the three foot pickaxe and got mining away at the dirt mountain, with Chris shovelling up and filling the barrow. Obviously, Cookie couldn’t have all the fun, and did an ax-cellent job as teaching Katie and Lucy how to axe efficiently. It was lucky social distancing was a thing, or there might have been a few more missing toes in Hammersmith that day...

On the other side of the garden, Sarah, Analiese, Jess and Arba were getting to the root of some problematic weeds, and did a ‘forking’ good job at filling up bin bags of unwanted vegetation. Sarah was delighted. She had ‘bin’ waiting all day for a chance to get her hands on a black sack, and couldn’t wait to ‘rake’ her move!

Nothing was spade as the boys got into their mud mound, with Biscuits overseeing now too. Lucy and Beth had moved down to prepare the areas for the freshly axed earth, and were ‘pick’-ing weeds and grass out for Katie to barrow over and dump the load.

Everyone was starting to tire a bit, after hours of good-deeding all day, so at 2:30, we bagged up the last of the weeds and attacked the last bit of the mound, before going to Brook Clean our hands. We were lucky enough to have a lunch provided thanks to Tesco’s across the road, who were impressed with our community work from the week before. Donatella had provided us with sandwiches, wraps, fruit, crisps, drinks and smoothies, and most importantly BISCUITS! The fare was shovelled down, and there was somehow even room for a Bears ice cream or two.

What ax-traordinary work - and we will be ‘hack’ on Wednesday eve to carry on the task.