This afternoon I met up with Abi, Jody and Rupesh for a mission in Brent for Mrs T (the first Brent mission of 2019! Woot! 🎉)

Mrs T has a well used garden but has found that she's less able to do some tasks after she hurt her knee last year. In particular, she's found that some bamboo in her garden has really taken over the place (to paraphrase her experience: "Always buy your bamboo from reputable sellers. Don't trust what friends from Hendon give you" 🤣). She called GoodGym so that we could help make a start on cutting it down, and also so that we could check on whether or not a light in her kitchen had blown.

To start with, we were shown the bamboo to be cut down. Luckily, Mrs T had plenty of tools for us to get started with. Unluckily, Mrs T had plenty of bamboo for us to use them on! This meant that even with four us going at it, there was still plenty left an hour or so in to the task.

Rupesh and Jody continued with cutting down the bamboo while Abi and I (and Mrs T) tried to make inroads into the clean up, chatting as we went. After another hour or so of this (which included most of us pretending to flagellate Abi, Abi getting bamboo in her eye (unrelated to the flagellation), and Rupesh playing the club classic, Mysterious Girl by Peter Andre), Jody and I had to head off, leaving Rupesh and Abi to finish what they could and take photos.

On our way out, Jody and I stopped to check on the light. It was a long tubular halogen light, and Mrs T wasn't too sure whether it was the light itself or the starter on the side that had gone. A couple of random fiddles determined that the problem was probably with the tube, so we brought it down for Mrs T to take to a hardware supply store to source a replacement (accidentally bringing down part of the light fitting with it, but I'm sure it was a bit loose anyway! 😅)

Given that the others are more succinct than I am in writing up reports, here's my idea of what their write-up is likely to say for the bit that Jody and I missed: we helped to clean up for another 30 minutes before making our goodbyes.

There's definitely more work to be done here. Hopefully what we did today is a good start and will go some way towards helping Mrs T get around her garden a bit easier 😄