True grit

6 incredibly courageous GGG members gathered last night at Charlton House for our first ever group walk, to a lovely little gem in our roster of places to go - the Maritime Museum's store! I checked my weather app and it "felt like -5 degrees", so it was pretty amazing that we had a decent group. The house was still covered in snow, and the pathways to Kidbrooke were very icy so good choice to walk together this week.

We started with a quick ice breaker (which failed tbh on the environment), but we did celebrate the very important National Bouillabaisse day and discussed our favourite soups. Some had seasonal preferences, while Tom shocked the group by admitting he didn't like soup, after ladelling out some criticisms we headed out with Andy backmarking.

The walk was quite tricky, the pavements are still pretty much covered in snow which has become ice. The group each had their own tactics, I mostly relied on confidence I wouldn't fall over in my boots. Others had employed proper walking boots, while Julian stormed it in his regular runners - and only slipped once! My favourite tactic was Marta and Andy dodging cars as the roads were the clearest surface.

We arrived at the task and Matt from the museum brought us in and talked us through the evening tasks. We were to take out two large and heavy covers to the garden which were previously used to cover plant beds. Once out in the garden we were to carry in a few garden chairs to sand down. Once we had completed this we warmed up by Matt showing us around his best map items kept in the stores. A highlight was "the oldest portolan chart in the National Maritime Museum's collections. These charts originated in the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and take their name from the written sailing directions, 'portolani'", plus a couple of beautiful celestial globes. This task is such a pleasure as we get to learn something while there and Matt is such an enthusiast for the subject matter!

We headed back downstairs to sand down the chairs as best we could, time flew by and we were soon shuffling back out into the cold and back to Charlton.

Thanks all for braving the cold and looking forward to celebrating with you all this evening a brilliant year of good deeding.