On “bank chocolate run-day” we had to be root-less to get through a sticky patch

A warm evening in the beautiful hamlet that is our beloved Richmond saw a hearty bunch of chocolate-fuelled GGers raring to go. We welcomed back Mark and Jenna after their week away and celebrated a fantastic 50 good deeds milestone for our very own Anita – who also lent a pun to the title of this report.

Off we went to the Green for some energetic warm up exercises, culminating in a spirited game of rounders-without-a-ball-bat-bowler-or-batsperson, all of us ‘egging’ each other on to win the race and claim the eggs-travagant prize of a bag of Mini Eggs©. It was a very competitive few minutes amongst the normally nonchalant GG group … and a couple of people suspected rushin' collusion when Jenna romped home in the final round to grab the spoils…

Fuelled by the adrenaline of such an elite competitive event, we headed off towards our task for the evening, at St Christopher’s Fellowship, coincidentally right next door to the ETNA centre we visited a few weeks back for silent skirting board cleaning and railings dusting. Fortunately Mark had spotted that our planned run via the towpath was at risk of flooding risk so rejigged the route to include a lap of Marble Hill Park, past the playground of last week’s task. It was still All Yellow.

Once on site, we handed out gloves, grabbed our tools and got stuck in. A red T-shirted swarm descended on the overgrown vegetable patch and within minutes we were making great progress clearing brambles, weeds and holly bushes – it really was a purple patch for GoodGym. Most of our tools were in good nick, but we soon found that some of our choppers were not up to the job, as they were unable to tug the pricks off the holly bush. So we reassigned some resources to an impromptu litter pick initiated by Ms 50-Deeds herself Anita – a plog which turned up some rather unusual items - and some dodgy impressions of HRH Wills himself!

Back at the vegetable patch, huge progress was being made as rakes and hoes tackled roots and stickyweed. Parts of the holly bush were still standing proud, but a massive group effort of loppers, shears and broken hoes saw us bring it down, adding the branches onto the enormous pile of foliage gathering to the side of the site. As Mark called the 5-minute warning we all dug in (some of us literally) and by the time we lined up for the photo the veggie patch had been transformed – in fact it looked rather radishing.

A warm Richmond GG welcome to Jack, former Barnet GGer who recently moved down our way, a whoop-whoop to Sally for her second run with us, and as always good to have Andy visiting. But with her 50 good deeds and tireless efforts, the day really belonged to HRH Anita