Stop bandstanding on my beds!

This week we had two lovely runs and one new task. After a nice warm up on the basketball court and potentially recruiting a Deliveroo rider to the GoodGym cause, the main group set off 2.5km to Clapham Common. We went to help out Bandstand Beds - a community growing scheme that has got some more space to expand their veg patches.

The space was full of old fences, branches, weird old clothes and other assorted rubbish that needed shifting to the dump area, ready to be taken away by the council. With head torches on, we got stuck in and moved all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff in 25 minutes. This is a brilliant effort that will enable the Bandstand Beds volunteers to carry on with their work. Hooray!

We then moved on to the common for some nice core work and Tom Hunter picked up the pace leading the group home. Great running team.

A group of 8 headed about 1K down the road to a GP surgery in Stockwell which is part of the wonderful Lambeth GP Food Co-Op.

They had had a delivery of 5 bags of soil but as the crane that delivered them wasn’t very big they had only made it just over the fence. The job was to distribute the soil amongst the big wooden planters so that they can grow even more stuff. Luckily for us with a short run to get there, we had plenty of time to get shovelling. It was a small space but we worked together like a well-oiled machine and had plenty of opportunity to chat.

There were lots of coincidences – task leader Andy (who we all assumed was a GP but it turned out was an audio-visual guy instead) and Shanice realised they'd worked together many years ago, before Shanice became quite the GoodGym tourist racking up good deeds and badges aplenty on the website.

Tom and Tessa compared notes on being a teacher and how Tom's disappointment in never getting to compete with his students in a school sports day lead to him putting the plans together for a pretty epic sounding GoodGym Olympics on June 10th. And Freyja, Beth and Andy compared notes on life as a plastic scouser, all having grown up on The Wirral.

Despite having the classic fear of ‘there’s no way we can finish this task’, after an hour of shovelling and spreading we had emptied all 5 bags and ran back to Papa’s feeling very pleased with ourselves.

There was also quite a bit of talk about this summer’s Welsh event, Race the Train which is happening in August, more info here.