Blue sky and sunshine for the 12 GoodGymmers who braved the hill up the Totterdown, making the mostbof the Banana (Benene, Binini,Bonono, Bununu, just for Frances) Bridge before it, too, closes for a couple of years to be fixed.

A local group is looking after some green spaces and making them more inviting, including this one (not the actual orchard but still technically an irchard as it has five fruit-like trees) that needed some woodchip moving from a big pile to start creating a winding path, hindweed to pull and fruit trees (what with it being an orchard) to water.

Riya, on her first good deed, mastered shovelling, raking and the all-important GoodGym proficiency test for wheelbarrowing after revealing she'd never tried any of then before - great work!

The runners, led by Vaguely Northern Darren and backmarked by Caroline, who was backmarked by 50-good-deeder Caroline, had already gotten to grips with the woodchip path-laying by the time the walkers arrived so Richard and Frances joined Melanie in trying to pull up the bindweed without pullout out, nor falling down, the bankside. Somehow Ed joined the path gang although he'd walked and defected to the running group for the return leg (where Marianne's 50th good deed cake was waiting - delicious!).

Darren took some lovely photos in the sunshine and if you can see through the glorious glare of the sun, Tom, Gareth and Freya were all hard at work casting long shadows.

Soon we'd weeded and pathed and were on our way back down the hill for tea, cake (and Ed's burger), cider and a lot of nonsense chattering about skiing chickens and Mr T(-pot). All pretty standard stuff.

Same tine next week?

8 runners (backmarked beautifully by David) and 3 walkers left Queen's Square 5 minutes apart and met exactly 1 kilometre from our starting position. Melanie stayed local as shes being unusually sensible with her broken foot.

For this week's homework, I would like to know how fast each group walked/ran and the first to correctly answer, will win a prize!

On with the task, we found the tools for the job behind reception and set to work on clearing up this amazing (and very well used) community space.

11 hands made light work of the weeds while dodging pre- and post-Pilates people (a novelty, we're more used to Yoga people), and attempting to translate the French lesson from the PowerPoint slides (Vaguely Northern Darren's 'F' in French A-level in 1990 did not help!^)

Richard G diversified and as well as proving adept at light holding, showed us his super sweeping skills, Gareth showed us his knife skills for those hard to reach wall weeds and Frances told a pirate joke that Laura (as our resident Cornish pirate) hadn't heard before!

When there were no more weeds to remove, the Walkers headed in to the night and Jason joined the runners for a change and showed us he can run if he really really really has to!

^Melanie's "A" at A-level Maths in 1991 thinks this was probably also 1991...

A group of us attended Manor Woods Valley group’s regular volunteering session to clear scrub from a wildflower meadow. It was lovely to see some cowslips and native daffodils already blooming on what they call the ‘Rabbit Field’. We had a first time Goodgymer today so well done to Nell for your first task! We cleared a massive site which was satisfying to see the progress made. Don’t worry there’s still plenty of scrub left for nesting birds. After the task was finished we were treated to some Manor Woods Valley apple juice made from the apples we helped harvest last year.