Is your Alley in a mess? Console Yourself

I ran with Jonny to the next task, just over a mile away on the edge of Erdington. We joined the other volunteers in the alleyway that I got to know well with Tousif and Ben the other week.

I had prepared Jonny for what he was about to face, but even though remarkable progress has been made by local volunteers and Birmingham City Council waste workers, there was quite a lot of rubbish, rubble, weeds and soil coating the path. As we began to join in, filling black bags, we found the root of the need for this task. One of the volunteers lives in a house backing onto this alley and has leaks in her bathroom plumbing, but she can’t get it fixed because it requires scaffolding and builders would need access to the back of the house through this alley. It is such a desperate situation and makes the selfishness of the people who have dumped the waste harder to bear.

With this in mind, we had the resolve to do as much in the time as we could. Jonny found some purple dumbbells, which would have worked well for one of his PT sessions, had they been matching weights. He also uncovered a PlayStation among the discards, which was intact but as salvageable as anything that had been out in the elements for at least a year. One useful item was an etched piece of glass which one of the volunteers took away to create something with it and bring it back to life.

After an hour and a half, we set off to the rest of our afternoon, with Jonny negotiating crossing Erdington on a run and I drove across Birmingham to get to the community mission in Stirchley.