The royal weed 👸

2 GoodGymers made their way to help an isolated older person in Hackney.

: Saturday, 25th of May 2019

Despite my natural inclination to tell people how great I am, I honestly hadn't planned to repeat it for two mission reports in a row (technically, four 😅). However, it appears that one isn't allowed to forget it for at least a day, so here goes...

I met up with Dharmesh pretty much at 2 on the dot for a mission for Ms C in Hackney.

Ms C has very limited mobility, and though she enjoys gardening, she's found it difficult to keep up with. She asked GoodGym if they could send a few runners over to help.

Dharmesh seems to attract gardening missions that require a sizeable amount of work, and today was no exception! There was a vast amount of weeds to clear, interspersed with sticky willy and brambles, and our remit was to clear as much of it as possible.

Knowing that doing the entire garden would be too much for one task, Dharmesh and I concentrated on the area closest to the house so that Ms C would at least be able to sit out in this sunny weather. Dharmesh was strangely pessimistic about how much we could get done in the time available, but he soon forgot that as soon as he discovered Ms C's amazing collection of gardening tools. There's something about very therapeutic/distracting about destroying everything in your path with a variety of specialist tools!

After an hour and a half or so, we'd filled around 7-8 bags of garden waste and decided to call it a day (I think Dharmesh surprised himself in the end by how much we got through!) 😄

Making our goodbyes to Ms C (who was really pleased with what we'd cleared in the time), Dharmesh and I headed to Victoria park for a celebratory picnic. After Dharmesh steered me away from picking a picnic spot: a) close to a toilet; and b) close to a discernable landmark in case Sally and Abi could make it later on, he'd somehow managed to steer me right into a group of GoodGymmers waiting to celebrate my 100 missions! (To be fair, I walked straight past them, so he had to re-steer me again by both stopping walking, and waiting for me to turn around and register the fact that I actually knew the people he was stood next to 😅).

In the order that (I think!) I met you, thanks to Abi, Danny, Sally, Peter, Patrick, Rupesh and Dharmesh for the amazing food, card, crown, cake and presents (Fyi, totally forgot I was wearing a crown until the overground staff started calling me princess, so the raiments of royalty obviously become me!): I truly felt like the Queen of the missions that your super sneaky secret WhatsApp group proclaimed me to be! 👸

Report written by Elizabeth

Discuss this report

Greenwich runner

Sunday May 26th, 2019 00:27

Yippee. Congratulations and monumental achievement to have helped 100 older people in one short year. Bet they all remember you :-)! Looks lovely fun and frolics at the picnic 🎉

Elizabeth

Sunday May 26th, 2019 12:06

Btw, my original mission report was going to be based on the Arnold Rimmer song from Red Dwarf. Here it is for posterity (it's amazing how little I actually had to change!):

Ms C’s in trouble; we will save the day
We’re brave and we're fearless come what may
Without us the mission would go astray
Using an-old, an-old, an-old strimmer

Without it life would be much grimmer
There’s nothing better as a rimmer,
It makes our goodwill brimmer
Using an-old, an-old, an-old strimmer

More reliable than another trimmer
It's never been mistaken for Yul Brynner
It's not bald, and its head doesn't glimmer

Master of the wit and the repartee
The obscurity of my run report is uncanny
How come it’s such genius? Don't ask me!
Ask an-old, an-old, an-old strimmer

We also used our hands to primmer
a lawn before saying

goodbye to wander off for dinner
Leaving an-old, an-old, an-old strimmer

No rhymes left now apart from quimmer
She'd better fade us out before we get to schlimmer
Fade out you stupid blimmer