Prologue

In a dark alley in Park Royal, a recently joined GoodGymer, Emmanuella, found a golden bottle that gleamed at her from the undergrowth. Not knowing what it was, she picked it up and gave it a rub. There was a brief splutter of liquid, then before her appeared something magical. It announced itself as the Peenie of the Lamp 🧞.

The Peenie gave Emmanuella 3 wishes. Looking around her, her first wish was that the alleyway was cleaner. It was full of all sorts of junk and it wasn't a nice place to walk through. Instead of fulfilling the wish itself, the Peenie contacted GoodGym Ealing and asked them to list a Group Run and litter pick to clean up the area.

Emmanuella put the bottle back, saving the 2 remaining wishes for future use.

The Group Run

Kash, Steph Ducat and Sevan met at Bodyline for a run out to the start point, Holy Family Catholic Primary School in West Acton which took them up the West Walk hill and through some woodland. They met walkers Madhan and Emmanuella at the task, got tooled up and went into the same alleyway where Emmanuella had found the Lamp to bag all of the litter.

Near the entrance, Emmanuella found Peenie's Lamp again. As the 5 GoodGymers made their way north, Steph started finding discarded dog poo bags. After a few, he said that he wanted to find the largest number of dog poo bags. Emmanuella whispered to the Peenie and Steph's unorthodox wish came true. He probably found a whole litter bag's worth of poo bags.

Next, Madhan was feeling thirsty. The Peenie was called on again and soon enough, Madhan found a full can of Strongbow and a little later, a Guinness chaser too. As usual, Sevan was focusing on the smaller details and he found some Scrabble letters. A 'G' and 'H', followed by an 'O'. He wanted to find the rest of the set so that he could spell GoodGym and take a photo for the report. The Peenie said no. All 3 wishes had been used up, so Sevan ended up tossing the letters into the rubbish bag.

With no more wishes remaining, the GoodGymers had to make do with their good old fashioned litter picking skills. Bottles (non-magical), cans and food packaging was spied and picked. By the end of the alley way, they'd found a perfectly good football, a kitchen bin, a personalised licence plate and had filled 5 waste bags in total. The alleyway was much cleaner.

Epilogue

Emmanuella had put the Peenie's Lamp in with the other waste. It was technically litter after all. It made its way to Greenford Waste & Recycling Centre, where a worker spotted it gleaming amongst the other rubbish and picked it off the heap, putting it to one side to check out later. Maybe the Peenie will enlist GoodGym's help again in the future.