Today I met up with co-millennials Abi and Patrick for a mission to tidy Mr C's garden. I knew I'd be in for an easy ride with them as Abi loves rescuing random garden critters and because Patrick brings the banging 90's and 00's tunes 🔊 These are both valued qualities on gardening missions.

We'd been informed in advance that Mr C had both guinea pigs and rabbits and were very much looking forward to meeting them 😍😍😍 Patrick was particularly excited as he'd never seen a guinea pig before. I told him about capybaras and his mind was blown.

However, it became clear on arrival that we were even luckier than we'd imagined: Mr C, angel that he is, is a consummate entertainer and likes to raise money for Great Ormond Street by performing close up magic and standup (he has puns for days!). He started regaling us with some of his act as soon as he opened the door, continued as he introduced us to all of his animals, and finished up over a cup of tea. All of this excitement meant that it took us a while to actually start on his garden, but we have no regrets, being more than happy to let him entertain us 😊

Moving on to the garden, our brief for the day was to do a general garden tidyup. In addition to this, Mr C indicated that he would like to ultimately lay a central path through some gravel to the rear of his garden and would like us to remove some (extremely heavy!!) paving slabs from the periphery of this area.

We started off moving the paving slabs (hereinafter christened the rocks-that-weigh). I think it was Patrick who started us using a neat trick of using a spade to lever the paving slabs off the ground to loosen them prior to attempting to lift them wholly off the ground. This worked a treat.

The rocks-that-weigh moved, we turned our attention to clearing some debris off the floor and clearing some brambles, weeds and ivy to the rear of the garden. In doing so, we uncovered yet more paving slabs (sighs), but they seemed to be a bit more entrenched than the side ones so we ended up leaving them there in order to concentrate more on clearing.

While we worked, Mr C brushed around the patio with a besom (I really regret not taking a picture of this besom 😩) and kindly offered us seemingly endless tea. Despite his limited mobility, Mr C was keen to do what he could and really wanted to help us make his garden into a neat space that he could be proud of.

By the end of the mission, we'd collected 9 bagfuls of debris/clippings and were ready to cut loose from each other with a dance to Footloose. (This did actually happen, but possibly because the wind was a little chilly and we needed to keep warm. I feel like more missions should finish with a dance number though.) There's more scope for continuing this job with future GoodGymmers, and I imagine that they'll be as entertained as we were by Mr C's standup and menagerie.