Sunday afternoon, and it's time for a mission! Today's victims, I mean, today's mission mates, were the awesome Scott and Girija. Having not worked with either of them for at least a month, I was looking forward for the opportunity to catch up with them 😄 Unfortunately our mission of three was missing a member today, as Oli woke up feeling a bit croaky. Hope you feel better soon, Oli! :)

Our mission took us to the home of Mrs M in Lewisham. Mrs M has an incredibly large garden. She's recently found that it's become very overgrown as she hasn't been able to tend to it as well as she'd like. She asked GoodGym if some runners would be able to come over and help make the garden a little safer for her.

We were greeted at Mrs M's very enthusiastically. She was so happy to have some help over that she'd arranged a barbeque so that she could also feed us while we worked! (😍) Excited by such largesse, it genuinely took us a few minutes to notice exactly how big the garden was (it was very big).

Perhaps sensing our trepidation at the gargantuan task ahead of us when asking what we should focus on, Mrs M kindly allowed us to pick our own task for today. Given the large scale of the garden and the fact that every man's house is his castle, we decided to focus on Mrs M's moat (i.e. a small pond feature 😅).

And so we passed a merry hour and a half hacking away around the pond. Aside from the general chitchat, Girija seemed to have lots of fun sampling the small wild strawberries she kept on finding. Scott noted that, in contrast, he only seemed to find scratchy brambles and midges! 😂 He managed to offset that, however, by having lots of fun with a petrol strimmer and with tickling a football out of the pond (there's no other way of describing it). I personally had a lot of fun taking boomerangs of the others working, and particularly of Scott's work with the petrol strimmer, which somehow looked as though smoke was coming out of his ass 😂

All of this joviality obviously disturbed some of the local wildlife, and we were all pretty excited to spot several frogs in the newly exposed pond (& one outside): cue me taking lots of pictures and trying to ask people if they had a frog in their moat 😅 [I tried to label the frogs in the photos, but, lacking arrows in my sticker library, had to settle for pointing to them with candy canes instead. I somehow feel like these do almost a better job than the arrows would have done].

Finishing up (we collected around 6 black bag fulls of green waste in total), we spent a pleasant time tucking into the barbecue before saying goodbye to Mrs M and waddling off to our respective Sunday evenings.

Lovely working with you both and see you again soon! (Hopefully at least at the GoodGym 10 year celebrations next month 🎉🎉🎉)