Resting Bench Face

Whilst a small crew of elves ran along with a santa sleigh in another part of town, the rest of us benchmarked more of the city!

Before I tell you all about benchmarking, we need to celebrate. The wonderful Vicky completed her 100th good deed over the weekend and tonight it was Katie's 100th good deed too. They took it in turns to wear the Centurion Cape with glee, so make sure you go and give them both an almighty cheer too.

My awesome Mu[val] was also visiting York from her resident GG Portsmouth tonight, donning her brand new black tee proudly (having received the MOST EVER cheers on one post after a successful social media cheering campaign!).

Right then, benchmarking. We are currently taking part in a gigantic project with Age Friendly York to benchmark the whole city so that there is a simple, up-to-date resource available showing the current locations of 'age-friendly' benches (i.e. have backs and arms).

Benchmarking is something of an orienteering challenge, where teams go out with a map showing historic locations of benches (as far back as 2008). Each bench has a number, and the teams have to check that the numbered bench is still at that location and is undamaged, whilst also confirming or denying the bench's age-friendly status.

Each team also has to run every street in their mapped zone, to check if there are any benches which are not currently mapped AND log (this is the complicated bit) the latitude and longitude of any newly discovered benches.

Does at least one person on this team know how to read a map?

Injured Ed and Boss of the Benches, Carl, were manning Mission Control, and were periodically calling teams to check progress and to add benches to the master database.

One team, who shall remain nameless, had left their team phone at mission control. Not entirely helpful.

As teams returned from their first map completions, they were given a lucky dip of Christmas song workouts including:

• Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer
• Santa Claus is Comin' to Town
• Jingle Bell Rock
• All I Want For Christmas

We managed to complete a much bigger area than anticipated so massive well done to all the teams.

We had one massive team workout to a bit of Mariah Carey, before a pub social to celebrate all the good (where Hero Huw provided amazing chocolate cake).