This evening's group run took us to St Luke's Church in Maidenhead, where we tidied up around gravestones and celebrated a milestone - Georgeta's 50th good deed!

Most of the evening was spent looking forward to celebratory cake. While we were thinking about the cake, we also enjoyed doing lots of other things:

• The runners had a chatty 3km run to the task - thanks to Juli for knowing the way and Jess for back-marking
• The walkers covered 1.5km - thanks Sheila for walk-leading
• We found it quite exciting and a bit spooky being in a dark cemetery. Particularly since the vicar had warned us to Luke out for dead bodies...
• We trimmed the lower branches of 3 or 4 trees, shifted some logs, cut back brambles, cleared up litter and swept up lots of leaves.
• Steve, Jess, Fiona and a hand fork had a fight with a root and lost
• Diya and Anita had a fight with a holly branch and won
• Kanika and Nicola felt watched by the resident falcons (the ones responsible for the aforementioned dead bodies!) whilst litter picking the perimeter
• We pondered whether the church had a steeple or a spire or both. Thanks to Steve for post-session research confirming that St Luke's has a spire. Thanks also to Kanika for sharing that a steeple is the whole tower of a church and the tapered top bit is the spire. I was starting to feel confused so did some of my own research and learned that the father and the nephew of the architect of the spire at St Luke's both had the initials G.G....
• Kanika's research also revealed that a spire can be the young shoot of a plant. St Luke's definitely had those! It was lovely to see these signs of Spring pushing up through the ground. The snowdrops were particuarly pretty.
  

Finally it was time for cake and celebrations. Thanks to Sheila for her beautiful and scrumptious chocolate cake, and to Anita for amazing homemade namak para savoury snacks and fabulous brownies. And thanks to Georgeta for giving us a reason to celebrate by doing 50 good deeds. Well actually it's 51 now...her good deeds are piling up so steeple-y we can barely keep track!

Georgeta is a regular group runner, and also one of the most active mission runners in our area. Whether she's tackling a hedge, designing a bed for potatoes, or fishing a tree stump out of a stream whilst balancing on a few twigs, Georgeta always faces the task with good humour and impressive strength and determination.

Her approach to fitness is similar - not only does she walk, run and cycle, but she has been known to run in wellies and to cycle gloveless in freezing weather and to still reach her destination smiling. She also makes a heavenly carrot cake and is a skilled seamstress. You can admire her zig zag stitches on our GoodGym flag next time it has an outing.

Georgeta, congratulations on the huge amount you have done to help in our community over the last year. You're an in-spire-ation!