All you need is glove

Good Afternoon Goodgymmers! For those of you who are regular readers of my run reports, there was one unanswered question from a previous run report, which I promised I would answer in this one. Patrick had two ice creams on his way back and he did not vomit once during his 11 mile run. Patrick, when I grow up, I can only hope to have your constitution and tolerance to lactose.

Back to the task at hand, two slightly sweaty goodgym runners,Rosie and Mridula (me) arrived in Hackney to help out Mr. S with his back yard. He was looking for us to trim back his hedges, which resided behind a fence, in order to be able to get some light into his lovely flat. There had been two goodgym runners before us, who cleared up is back yard, but weeds and brambles were returning. As we set off to work, Mr. S informed us that he had no gloves! Rookie mistake, neither I or Rosie had bought any. Fortunately we were close enough to a street where I thought I could pop out and get a pair of gloves. Unfortunately that wasn't the case! Given it was 7pm all shops were shut. I thought I had a stroke of genius, and popped into a Cactus shop (yes this is a thing!) thinking surely this was a place with gardening gloves, I was out of luck.

Returning back, I figured out we could just make it work. I also thought that being an asian woman who cooks, I was genetically blessed with asbestos lined hands. Unfortunately in my hands vs brambles, the brambles won. And we were back to square one. I was about to resign myself to providing Rosie with emotional support in the form of my ever incessant chattering, when I spotted my saviour (and her's too! I talk waaaay too much)! A lone murder glove was in the fenced off area. (I assume it was used for murder. Why else would someone casually chuck it over the yard).

However, it was behind a fence which involved going through what appeared to be a forest of brambles. Refusing to give up, and given that I had just played the Crystal Maze a couple of days ago (I was magnificent!) I decided to use my deductive skills and solve this problem. Using a stick and my dexterity, I managed to tease out the glove, and result! I could now make myself useful!

In all this time of my faffing, Rosie was actually being productive and chopping down the hedge. however, this was not as easy as it seemed, because Mr. S's Hedge trimmers were fairly blunt. Finally being able to help out, I tried to help her by packing up the detritus, and also stabilising her chair, which she stood on to get to higher branches. Having been slapped in the face by pine branches in previous missions, I had my technique down, and managed to just about avoid repeats.

Whilst all of this was going on, we were "treated" to music from the neighbours up above. the genre of music sounded like someone put a microwave in a washing machine and put a drum and base tune to it. I reminisced fondly to quality of music of my youth, back to a simpler time when it was socially acceptable to rhyme the word cancer with dancer. How I miss the lyrical contributions that you made to the fabric of the universe, Snap!. You really got me through the tough times of my adolescence.

Rosie managed to trim back the hedges considerably and and let a tremendous amount of light in. She generated a massive amount of shrubbery which we collected into 9 trash bags whilst we had a chat! She does fascinating work in speech therapy! Ask her about it one of the group runs that she attends in Camden!

An hour and a half later we were done! We got Mr. S and he had a big grin on his face from all the light that was now being let in. He had a quote on his door, which I paraphrase, that said, doing good makes you feel good. Nice to see Mr. S and goodgym are on the same page. We then proceeded to go our separate ways, Rosie for a drink at the pub, me to enjoy a pootle home on my bike! Till next time goodgymmers!