'Tis the season to litter pick the streets of Oxford, so to Headington we headed for an evening of nattering and trash clearing.

We focused on the area surrounding the Oxford Brookes Headington campus, finding plenty of the usual suspects; cans, bottles, crisp packets etc. We were just chatting about how rarely we find pants these days, after a spate of unearthing them on almost every litter pick, when lo and behold Ben spotted a pair hooked on the railings. It's like we manifested them.

1 hour, several heavy bags full of trash, and a potential new recruit later, we deposited our haul for collection and headed off home to warm up.

Our winter food bank clean got going last night; a very welcome indoor task given the sudden chill!

Each winter we do a session roughly once a month to give the food bank a thorough clean. It's hard for their usual team of volunteers to take time away from packing food parcels to do a really thorough clean, so GoodGym taking over the task helps them focus on getting food out to people in need.

This month we cleaned fridges, emptied food waste, cleaned the wall behind the food waste crates, swept & mopped in the kitchen. In the main hall we moved the shelving along the wall closet to the car park, swept, mopped, cleaned the shelves.

Today we returned to Littlemore for tea and cake, oh sorry, I mean helping in the village hall garden.

The village hall in Littlemore has a lovely garden which requires a bit of TLC every now and then. A nettle patch created to attract bees and butterflies had encroached on a flower bed, weeds had popped up in a lawn area, various plants needed pruning and leaf piles created.

Armed with tools, and luxury of all luxury at a gardening task, kneeler pads we set to work and after a couple of hours the space was looking ship shape and shiny.

We then were treated to tea, cake and chat in the village hall - glorious!

On Saturday we built a dead hedge at Kate's Place in Florence Park. It was a very satisfying task - easy to grasp the system, pleasing to see progress, and a really good way to use up waste material. It creates a wonderful additional habitat as well as a barrier.

Chatting chickens and kittens while we worked made for a wholesome Saturday morning.

Welcome to GoodGym Ocean!

This evening we returned to the Warneford Hospital site to do some more work on their anniversary garden installation.

More compost was poured into the huge metal planters, more gambions were filled with stones and pinecones (pretty sure we could all have a crack at dry stone walling now!) and we were able to congratulate Anwen, Fred and Andy on their cracking performances at the Oxford Half Marathon!

Working quickly to race the sunset and dying light (said in my best Michael Sheen voice) we achieved a brilliant amount. Can't wait to see the finished result!

A few of us then went for a run, where I inflicted an intervals session on the group, SORRY!!!!

Until next week......... xoxo