It was the day before Star Wars day, so the Force was strong today with the runners at the Fields - although disappointingly no-one arrived dressed as either Darth Vader or a StormTrooper...to be fair it's a (nearly) fifty year old film, which probably ages me more than today's youthful participants...

Run Director Rue was determined to put a little more structure into today's set up - so we had a specific area for the barcode scanners and then, interestingly, he'd laid out cones in a double rectangle "for the warm up" - which proved successful as long as you paid close attention to the instructions.

Grateful for the "volunteer parents" who stepped in at the last minute to don the high viz, and helped by an increasing number of DoE pupils on finish tokens, timekeeping and barcode scanning duties, we were good to go on the dot - Hilary was at her regular Turn 1 spot, and Nick on timekeeping duty.

8 and a little bit minutes later (the Force was strong with this one), our first placer crossed the line, closely followed three seconds later by our regular visitor from Milton Keynes - and soon a steady stream were sprinting down the sunny finishing straight, with this week's tailwalker, Maria who'd come all the way from West London (thank you) and then set off to walk back to Hounslow, crossing the line to complete another successful week of running at the Fields - 12 PBs were set today, just over a quarter of the field. Great work all round.

Same time next week under the Big Tree, where the Force will continue to be strong...

There's been a theme this week of suppliers failing to deliver the correct items to our beneficiaries (see armchair mission for Mr G of earlier this week). Only as I put the two halves of the divan base together on the floor (whilst following the instructions...) did it become apparent that the two halves were mismatched - one had plastic locking brackets, and one had a metal bar/pin mechanism, and so it was impossible to lock the two parts together.

I explained all this to Ms S, who said she'd go back to the supplier, but in the meantime was keen that I "made her bed" so that she at least had somewhere to sleep on. I told her that if she was successful in getting a correct replacement half that would fit properly with the other, then GoodGym would happily return to complete the task.

One of the most comfortable "furniture building" missions ever completed as the item in question (a rack for Miss V's CDs) was compact (...!) and I had a chair and table to work on, whilst Miss V watched TV. I soon had it completed and ready to be filled with music and so Miss V and I had a long chat about other tasks that GoodGym could do for her before I left her to rack up.

The sardine shelves were completely bare at M&S this afternoon - I'm sure there are reasons that people far smarter than I can explain. Fortunately everything else was gettable at the usual haunts for Mr T and I was soon back at his with trolley in tow. We sat to watch the snooker whilst putting the world to rights for another week, and just as I was leaving he kindly handed me a bag of potatoes and carrots - another good friday indeed.