‘Cherry Aid 🍒 ‘

A few weeks ago, while out dog walking, I found some patches of woodland full of litter not far from Greenhead Park, the home of Huddersfield parkrun. I knew that Huddersfield GoodGymmers love a good litter pick so planned a Community Mission to address the squalor in the woods after parkrun. To appeal to everyone’s competitive nature I set the team a set of challenges in the style of a scavenger hut. Today’s GoodGymmers needed to find a KitKat wrapper, some Christmas related rubbish, anything cherry flavoured and something with packaging in a foreign language. As we came out of the park we delivered a few flyers (left over from Tuesday’s group run) promoting Forget-Me-Not Children’s Hospice’s charity Christmas tree collection. Then it was into the woods and on with the litter collection. SallyAnn was the first to find an item on our list, some gift ribbon. There was some debate about whether this was Christmas related but she put up a good argument so we let her have it. Next David found a cherryade can, followed by Wendy finding a plastic bag with Arabic writing on it all the way from Dubai. A little later, and with much excitement a KitKat wrapper was located on the other side of a fence. SallyAnn and David worked together to extract it and both claimed a sweet as their reward. In one area of woodland lots of empty cherryade cans were found and the sound of GoodGymmers calling out ‘cherry’ each time one was located reverberated around the trees. After an hour of 'wombling' we tied up our bin bags and left them by the roadside for collection. Munching on sweets we made our way back to the cafe in the park for a much deserved hot drink feeling good in the knowledge that we had removed five bags of plastic (including the star find of an elephant shaped toilet brush holder!) from the woods.