Linda has been quietly spending a lot of her parkrun mornings doing some unofficial VI guiding (Visually Impaired), so this weekend I joined her to see how it worked with a view on sharing the work in the future.

VI Guiding:

• Simon from GG Islington is involved with Achilles International and does weekly running sessions on Thursday evenings, new guides very welcome!

• This Saturday there happens to be a Learn to Guide workshop with Achilles, in the Olympic Park, in case you are curious

Five of GGR's finest arrived to help out at Frenford Foodbank.

Linda and Ed arrived early to set up. They were soon joined by last minute and very welcomed sign up Kathryn who helpfully brought along her Mum to assist us. We also welcomed back our Helena who can't always get to food bank but is always a valuable member of the team when she does. Last but not least AJ came to celebrate her 200th good deed with us. In keeping with tradition (which began with her 100th) she started with a spillage 🙄😂.

Along with the Frenford volunteers we all worked alongside each other helping one another out and getting the job done by lunchtime so 50 local households will be a little better off for it. We even had time to have a little tea break with the usual party guest Colin🐛.

5 Goodgymmers made their way to the last Babybank session before the summer break, by the usual variety of methods, including running, cycling & walking.

Adam discovered the nice laminated labels to mark the different age categories had disappeared, so we were back to the old school post-it notes and soon got stuck into the bags provided.

For some reason this load seemed to have a higher than usual amount of clothing being too big - 3 or 4 year olds don't quite classify as a baby anymore!

As if we aimed fir it, on the mark at 8 all bags were sorted, plies bagged up and put away for others to process from there.

Job done, we said our goodbyes and made our respective ways home. With the babybank now closed for the summer break, we'll find out in a few weeks when we will be resuming sorting duties, so keep an eye on the website for updates.

A quick half-hour session to water planters outside the station. Hopefully, good rain also arrives later today to properly soak the plants!

3 arrived by bike and one got the train to our starting point. We all took a gentle walk over to the corner house, and waiting for the task owner to show up, she happened to be a bit late. 2 stayed behind to admire the flowers and get a plan together, while the other 2 went off and fetched the ladder from the task owner's house. Once arrived back at corner house, we were set the task of mounting trellis to a wall with the plan of attaching trellis to some bricks and chucking them over the wall, and hoping gravity will keep it in place. Plan in place, Peter went up the ladder moved some thorns out of the way and got the trellis up. There was some repeated attempts of getting the bricks/counterweights over the wall, but eventually we done the task at hand. We walked back to task owner's house with the ladder and then went on a small walk back to our starting point. One person did unfortunately leave their personal items behind, but luckily managed to retrieve them, and with that we said ta ra.

A productive lunch break watering a community garden with the water from the station’s men’s loo! 🤘

Thanks to a local business’s donation we now have two extra watering cans - what a difference it makes to speeding up this job!