No time to waste

We left our lovely Town Hall Hotel sharpish this evening, as we knew it was going to be a task-and-a-half.

We warmed up quickly on the hotel steps, with mucho multi-tasking: head-counting, planning, light-allocating, stretching and mobilising all in one quick hit.

With Chris leading the run, we headed along Roman Road's bustling back streets to meet the rest of our crew, and the fantastic Friends of Meath Gardens, at the basketball court in beautiful Meath Gardens.

Teams were divided into two to start with: the Cemetery Park Squad and Team Woodchip (but there was later a woodchip sub-squad). Tyres were pumped, trolleys revved and the team were off to the Cemetery Park.

What were they doing?

Well, remaining logs needed collecting from the Cemetery Park who had kindly donated these to the Meath Gardens newly created protected-tree areas. Transport this evening was eventually by Zip van, but...the logs needed piling into the van and unloading. So our runners jogged the mile-long route down the canal with wheelbarrows and trolleys and met the Meath team at the Cemetery!

Woodchip PBs

Meanwhile, the woodchip squad divided into teams of shovelling, wheeling and spreading. It was already hard work but then those bright sparks at the Mulch Mound decided to set an additional challenge of timing each wheelbarrow-run across to the rakers. Joy. "Go, Nina! 1:18 - we reckon that's a PB!" Gruelling!

The time flew: a lot was achieved and the Meath team were happy, as were we, at a fine evening's work.

And the round of applause...

Shout-outs to the whole fantastic crew this evening, especially Chris for leading the run; Áine for some cracking pics of the Cemetery Squad; Áine, Stephen, Simon and Chris for the Cemetery route planning and run-leading... And to Rob, for tonight's pun, the most sophisticated we've seen for a while.

And welcome to Jess, who joined us for her first Group Run. Hope to see you very soon, Jess!

We'll be returning to Meath soon to join a weekend tree-planting effort, and for a Monday Night Mulch Return.

Meanwhile next week, we're back to Kedlestone Community Centre as we join Margaret (and the tin of Heroes) for more gardening, glasshouse and Centre fun.

Until then.

It was the GoodGym show today at Bethnal Green Food bank as 5 of us turned up for a lunchtime session preparing for the big day tomorrow - Wednesday is distribution day when the members of the community reliant on the food bank are able to collect an essential bag of groceries for the week ahead.

We joined a few of the regular volunteers and as most of us were new to the Tuesday sessions we quickly got up to speed with what was needed.

Initially we set about preparing the bags that are to be handed out tomorrow, starting with the packs for families with children which were very quick to assemble.

Then by the time the majority of us had arrived we moved onto the meat bags, which involved picking a number of standard items including cereal, orange squash, rice and some tins along with the meat specific portion of the bag.

Once we finished that and we were onto the 81 bags of fish 🐟 based packages we were in full flow and it was just the 5 of us racing through the bags in next to no time as we had very much honed the process. It was a very collaborative effort with the efficient production line of bag packing a joy to behold.

Once that was all sorted we handled a number of other miscellaneous tasks around the food bank before heading our various ways, pleased with another good deed done.

Special mention to Jess on her second ever task 👏 Here's to many more!