This morning I met up with Dave for a gardening mission in Southwark for Mrs T. Some fundamentally British part of me wants to comment that it was very windy today (at one point, the winds made a mockery of my sweeping up 🤷). I'd also like to say that Dave acted as his own wind machine, with an large amount of hay fever-induced, full body sneezing. I'm not saying that Dave's sneezing is the butterfly that caused a storm around the rest of the country: I'm just laying some observations out there, and allowing people draw their own conclusions 😉

Mrs T has lived in Southwark with her husband for 5 years (married for over 50!), and has always been a keen gardener. A couple of years ago, she had an operation on her spine that limited her range of movement. This means that she's unable to keep her garden cut back enough to enjoy safely, as it grows onto and over the pathways. Our task today was to help make the garden a bit safer for her.

As with most gardening missions, we had both some lopping and some weeding to do. Having done more than my target step count before the mission had even started, I decided that I would quite like to sit down for a bit, thank you very much. Consequently, I sneakily volunteered to weed. Entirely unaware of my stratagem, Dave took over the task of lopping at some greenery, something that he seemed more than happy to do, despite the health and safety risks involved in such an undertaking 😄👍 I love the fact that mission mates always seem to work out like this!

As we worked, we mostly chatted with Mrs T about her time in both London and beyond, and heard about GoodGymmers of missions past. She was very helpful in both pointing out bits of the garden that we needed to chop back futher, and in pointing out which bits that we really shouldn't chop down because there were pears on them... 😅😬

After an hour or so of work, we started to pack/clean up. In total, we'd generated around 9 bags of garden waste, which we took to a communal refuse area. This included a lot of Dave's otherwise undocumented lopping/chopping, which was either high up (see pictures of Dave on his tippy-toes) and/or outside, where I hadn't thought to take photos prior to him starting work 😅 I felt like this was a decent haul for two people 😄👍

Mrs and Mr T were both really happy with what we'd done, and gave us some biscuits and some chilled orange juice to enjoy before we headed off. I spotted Judge Judy on in the background and wished even more keenly that I could stick around longer, but unfortunately some cake was calling from a nearby shop🍰🤤

It was fun working with you, Dave. Hope your sneezing stops soon! 😄✌️