Sweeping with the fishes

Mireille, Anna and James visited Mrs J on Sunday afternoon and helped tidy up her lovely garden.

First up Mrs J kindly showed us the garden and explained what she wanted us to do: remove a season’s worth of leaves from the flower beds, de-weed certain areas of grassy-type nuisances, prune the rose bush. A general tidy up.

We were raring to go. To help us complete these tasks, Mrs J revealed a veritable treasure trove of tools for us to tool with. We had trowels, we had forks, we had a broom with a big long stalk. We had special secateurs that got to live in the house. Doubtless a sore point with the other tools.

Hang on. Secateurs are sharp. Sore point - that has potential for a run report title pun, no? No. Not today anyway. Did we mention that Mrs J has a fishpond inhabited by a killer goldfish? Yes, the sizable fellow was sizable for a reason: he used to have pondmates but, well, he ate them. Or she ate them. Well, let's just say they were eaten. By it.

So, with the guilty gills of a cut-throat carp rippling menacingly just metres from us, we got to work. We cleared several tightly packed garden bags worth of leaves, making a huge difference for the garden. Turns out there was soil under there.

We got talking too. About upcoming races (we’re all looking forward to running The Big Half), about what an open pottle of yoghurt might be doing in the garden (turns out it’s a local avian delicacy), about upcoming GoodGym good deed milestones (Anna approaches 100, Mireille nears 50, James is just behind Anna who is now feeling competitive so he suspects he may stay that way), and many things besides. Such as the freshwater felon.

Leaves bagged, we then performed a spot of surgical weeding, some precision-guided pruning and some good old fashioned brooming. Job done.

We said goodbye to a very happy Mrs J and before parting had time for one last judicial decision - the poisonous poisson must receive its due process via run report title pun-nishment.