Our Mission today at Mile End was Briony’s first. Only a fortnight into GG and already on Missions - smacking it straight away, nice one!! To my mind however it was pretty-much a baptism by fire. There was a vast amount to do, not ideal tools, and in the cooking hot sun with barely a slither of shade to take a breather in.

The garden area was chest high with dense brambles, and the patio had numerous objects strewn around with weeds growing all amongst them. Also amongst them as we were to discover was every swarming thing that swarms on the ground and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the Earth.

In spite of a kind neighbour providing us with some tools, the condition of them meant we weren’t going to be able to make much impact on the garden, so we elected to focus on the patio instead… our plan was to organise the stuff, and weed amongst it as we did so, leaving the garden for another time. The stuff included a lot of timber, bricks, a knackered rabbit hutch, tons of saucepans, a few dustbins etc. Large brambles, metal mesh, rusty nails and broken glass meant we had to go slowly to not get mangled. In the disarray it was in when we arrived and with the weeds all amongst it, it looked pretty disheartening, but it was remarkable once it was stacked up in one corner how little space this stuff actually took up.

Along the way we saw countless slugs, snails, ants, woodlice, centipedes and a dense isolated population of earthworms. The variety of different objects had created a niche for everything, plus some of the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen, who were busy having a fight! They should have had other priorities however as we were in the process of completely destroying their habitat - sorry about that! Also hidden amongst the stuff were about 20 kids balls of all different types, which we were able to return to next door. They were playing out at the time, so thanked us through the fence as we posted them over the top.

After 90 minutes (contemporaneous to our Mission, England took the same amount of time to trounce the dishonourable Panamanian football team in the World Cup) the amount of sun we’d gotten meant we chose to call time for today, lest we do ourselves a mischief.

Before we took the rubbish bags through to the front, we brought our host out to see what had changed. He seemed impressed and remarked at the difference, and whilst it was unfortunate that the garden part remained untouched, there was now tons of new space on the patio that he should be able to make use of to sit out on in the sun; or to dry laundry perhaps. We mentioned that if he was able to get himself some decent tools, some GoodGymmers should hopefully be able to come back for round two, the garden itself…