This morning I met up with the awesome Anja for a mission in Islington for Ms J.

Ms J has a small, enclosed garden area attached to her block of flats that's accessible through a neighbour's garden. Because of its access and enclosure, she hasn't been able to look after it as well as she'd like, and it's become very overgrown. GoodGym were asked if we could help out with this.

After Ms J welcomed us into her garden (using a non-standard handshake that I'm sure the youth of Islington would probably recognise), we assessed the garden: At a lower level, there was a lot of debris on the floor, which made entering and moving through the garden pretty tricky! At a higher level, there were multiple branches of a dead tree that insisted on stabbing us in the head whenever it felt like we were ignoring it too much (more often than I liked!) Anja and I therefore decided to focus on moving a lot of the debris and stabby branches out of the way to make it safer for Ms J (& any returning GoodGymmers!) to work in.

Plan of action decided, we got to work. Ms J joined us as we worked our way through the garden, reminiscing on when she'd acquired various items as we re-discovered them. Aside from a defunct vacuum cleaner (bought, we were assured, 30 years ago at an ideal home exhibition), I was particularly impressed by the discovery of two ladders on the floor that were almost wholly enclad by ivy until we dug them out. Thankfully we didn't find any snakes to go with them, but did make a bunch of accompanying stakes from the branches of the dead tree.

After 90 minutes or so of clearing the clearing (sans defunct vacuum cleaner), as Anja and Ms J were showing no signs of stopping I put on my best school teacher voice and told everyone to put their secatuers down as the practical exam was now over. Obviously I'm more authorative that I think I am as, despite a few errant snips when they thought I wasn't looking, we finished up, took the bags out of the space and made our goodbyes in short order.

Lovely working with you, Anja! Hopefully see you on another one soon! 😄