Pins and Fiddles

Madiha is known for occasionally recruiting special guests from all around the world to join GoodGym Ealing sessions. The visitor at today's Horsenden Farm community mission was her uncle, Afsar from Pakistan, who used to be a farmer. Afsar is doing a lot of good for his community in his home city, where he daily picks litter at local green spaces. He is a natural volunteer and loves the idea of GoodGym. His grand plan is to open a branch in his home city, GoodGym Islamabad! While visiting Ealing, he's planning on doing some good deeds for our community, so watch this space and maybe you'll see him at a few sessions!

The rest of the GoodGym team today included runners: Sevan, Kash and Anuj - the latter coming straight from Northala parkrun and quickly swapping his red parkrun top for the red GoodGym t-shirt. It was a busy morning for Anuj - he was definitely going to need a pizza after the session! 🍕

Elsa from Friends of Horsenden Hill had a couple of tasks for us today. The high-priority job was (again!) - fixing a security issue. On the way to the task, we met our friends, the goats! This time, those two troublemakers were not the escapee animals for whom we would build better barricades today. We were going to fix the pig pen instead. The piglets were finding gaps in the existing fence and breaking out! Nick was the boss of today's assignment and explained that we had to remove the big metal pieces from the barrier and then place and secure a second layer of wire fencing all around the pen.

Everyone got so enthusiastic about the job that the metal bars soon disappeared from the fence. We chose a sizeable roll of wire and started unfolding it. In the meantime, Nick placed new stakes around the pen and brought a bucket of pins to connect the wire fencing to the poles. Sounds good, right? The problem was - there was only one hammer for five GoodGymers.

Elsa managed to find a second hammer, which helped us to speed up a bit. The teammates without hammers were unfolding the fencing, holding it in place and distributing the pins to the hammer operators, who had to fiddle a bit with the nails before driving them properly into the wood. Sometimes, a pin would drop and plunge into the mud. Often, it would not go into the wood at the angle we aimed for. Anuj, who had never built a pig pen before, hammered most of the nails in (including the last one!) and was proud to acquire yet another new skill through GoodGym.

As we had too many people for the construction, Sevan was relegated to the manure transport department. He was wheelbarrowing the muck even further up than our famous potato patch, and caught the sight of Gruffalo!

The fence builders finished the piglet-proof barrier five minutes before the end of the session 👏. Hopefully, the pigs will get too big to escape through the gaps before they figure out how to beat the new security system!