4 keen beans arrived bright-eyed and bushy tailed with good intentions to help out following Kingston First’s call for volunteers. But as with most good intentions....

We waited very patiently outside, consulted the instruction leaflet and email correspondence to check that we had got the time, place and date right, then opted to ring the doorbell. We took so long doing this that we attracted the attention of a friendly security guard, who used his radio to seek advice. The advice: ring the doorbell. This was an advanced level tutorial and required additional security guard backup. Unfortunately this did not resolve the matter.

Not ones to be defeated, we reached level 3 of our escalation process: phoning the contact on the leaflet. Only to be met by a voicemail of somebody with an entirely different name.

Undeterred by lack of tools, instruction or supervision, we set of on our quest to find the flower beds that Kingston First had sought volunteers to plant. We had location descriptions and photos and felt like we were on an orienteering project. We found bed number 1 and were impressed by the quality of work that we had managed to achieve in less than 15 minutes: a creatively designed bed, featuring an advertising board, surrounded by grasses, salvia (according to Caroline), sage, thyme and something else that doesn’t feature on the Weedipedia so we are assuming it is a plant, all arranged in regimental order. We inspected as quality control, picked out a touch of litter, admired our “work” and set off to find bed number 2. Bed number 2 seemed to have taken some abuse with a touch of trampling and we tutted noisily at a man using the bed to discard his cigarette butt. We identified some additional plants and then found another bed which we claimed as our “before” shot.

We took a scenic detour to visit the chickens at Canbury Community Gardens - no eggs for brunch but we waved at them from afar.

A touch of litter picking later, we ended up where all good community missions should end: Bill’s