😁 24 excellent GoodGymmers gathered on a very pleasant bank holiday Monday evening for a two-task session.

👋 We were thrilled to welcome Sara to her first task and Becca to her first group run.

🍫 We also enjoyed some chocolates, courtesy of the new Raleigh-GoodGym partnership.

🏦 We named, numbered off and warmed up by discussing either our favourite bank (thanks Ed) our favourite bank holiday activity. The bank of Dave (great film) and the bank of Mum and Dad featured, alongside Nationwide! Meanwhile, favoured bank holiday activities included exercising, eating, drinking and sleeping.

➗ It was soon time to split into two teams for this evening’s tasks, with Nick leading the run to Fishergate and Mitch leading the run to Acomb Methodist Church.

🖌 At Acomb, we met Barbara and Claire who were still working hard away, since the earlier community mission, chipping away the old paint from the church noticeboard. We’d hoped to get the stripping and sanding done during said community mission to do some painting during the group run. That was a tad optimistic though, so we all got stuck in continuing to battle the many layers of paint that coated the noticeboard. There were ladders and a variety of tools and techniques on display, along with various degrees of success, mostly based on the looseness of the paint in each of our areas. Barbara had kindly agreed with Mike the caretaker that we would attempt to tidy the plethora of mess that we’d created so we went about this with the tools available and hope that it looks vaguely tidier as a result. And I’m sure we’ll be back to continue stripping and sanding the noticeboard before we can start painting it.

🌱 Meanwhile, here’s what Debs had to say about the larger group at Fishergate: “We triumphed over much turf. There are future turf wars to be fought. We filled the skip and Amy and I squashed it in with safe stomping. Rich battled with benches and mostly won.”

🍌 It was soon time to regroup back at base and head home or to the pub for appropriately alliterative banana bread and beer.

👍 We’ve got plenty happening for the rest of the week so do sign up if you can. And we’ll back for another bank holiday special group run, delivering leaflets for the Community Furniture Store.

Five of us met on a sunny Monday afternoon for a pre-group run mission to tackle an old church noticeboard.

Our task was to try and scrape/sand as much of the old paint off it as possible before repainting. We scraped and scraped several layers of paint which only wanted to come off in very small pieces and in a lot of places not at all! We managed to make a big mess of the floor underneath (which we did sweep up later) although we didn't seem to make a huge impression on the back of the noticeboard. The front fared better but there is still a lot of work to be done.

Charlotte, Leanne and Nicky left after about an hour and a half whilst myself and Claire stayed on to await the group run contingent of another batch of helpers plus Nicky who came back again.

At the end of the group run (despite myself and Claire putting in a 3 hour+ stint) there was still a lot of work to be done so I'm sure there will be a return mission!