Walpole Park has been a frequent GoodGymming spot throughout December and January due to its seemingly endless supply of matter that needs shifting from place A to place B! The February session was no different, with an objective to mulch the newly planted tree whips along the park’s easternmost path.

Five Ealing GoodGymers, who met at the Tuesday group run, enjoyed the first evening of the year, which felt as if spring was just around the corner. No freezing fingers, no wind, no rain - well, if you don’t count the puddles remaining after the filming in Walpole Park earlier in the day. The film shoot involved pipes hung from the trees along the main alley to make fake rain, quite ironically, on the second rainless day of 2026 in London.

Chris, Freya, Sevan, Steph and Kash used their superhuman senses (and head torches) to locate the whips planted around an imposing plane tree in the dark. The stems were thinner than a little finger and easy to miss. The team had to be extra careful when wheelbarrowing mulch from a nearby woodchip pile to the end of the path, and not stomp on the whips. Survival of the fittest is not GoodGym’s motto after all. Buckets came in handy when carrying woodchip to the furthest areas to mulch.

The park was quiet and peaceful, apart from lively chats about travels and shrieks of foxes having fun in the bushes. The team covered the section of planted whips leading to the plane tree and around it. A few other nearby planted areas remained woodchip-free, but we’re keen to give it another try next week!

Today's Care4Calais session saw the 2-2 theme from the earlier Pitshanger Junior parkrun continue, with the team's skirts staying on through this session too. There was no other fancy dress on display as the start of the task was all business.

Boxes of school uniforms had arrived at C4C's West London base and the first task was to sort through them, getting rid of anything that was damaged or poor quality. Next, the clothes were organised by size. Instead of the child's age, which GoodGymers had used for previous school uniform tasks, the key today was the waist size as most donations were trousers. Some pairs were brand new, still with tags on and others had been to many lessons. Where helpful ex-owners had removed the size labels, as usual, the team needed to lay out the trousers to guess the waist size.

With the school uniforms bagged up, it was onto more colourful, less... grey clothing. First up were men's clothing donations where there were a lot of brands. Someone was clearly upgrading last season's Gucci/Lacoste/Givenchy for something new. Working through the women's clothes donations was fairly straight forward apart from some interesting sizing by the brands. A "medium" top that could fit 2 GoodGymers in it for example, well, that seemed like more of an (X)XL.

The final sizing issue that the team encountered was the size of the boxes in the storage room. Some were overflowing before the new donations even arrived. No matter how much Angela and Kash tried to squeeze in more jumpers or t-shirts, they wouldn't go. Admitting defeat, task owner Tamzin had to find the team some new overflow storage.

Today's session was all sorting and no pack creation because the ticket printer was on the blink, meaning that the tickets for new requests couldn't be created. Sevan had a look as the task wrapped up, pressed some buttons and like magic, the printer spat out a sheet of requests, ready for the afternoon's volunteering group to work through.

The Pitsanger fitness ensemble: Steph, Maria and Kash were up early for the dress rehearsal of Tchaikovsky's greatest ballets: Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Given the weather, the performance could have been renamed into Swan Puddle and the Mudcracker.

The trio in tutus entered the Café Berry stage to find out they had an audience: faithful balletomane Harvey! Neither rain nor a Newcastle match would stop him from showing up to applaud his ballerina friends!

After the unassuming entrée, the dancers threw themselves into a series of spirited allegros.

Jumping jacks
Crab walks
Jumps with hands up
Curtsy lunges
180-degree twist jump
Front kicks
Single-leg jumps and pirouettes
Front lunges
Side-side-side touch-the-ground jumps
Back lunges with kicks
Cross jacks
Side-to-side squats

Harvey gave them a standing ovation and requested encore. So the ballerinas repeated their whole choreography.

I am speechless! - Harvey.

The Swan Trio concluded the repertoire with gentle stretches, complete with arabesques as a fitting finale!

Our GoodGym gang defo got the tutu memo - the dressage was out in impressive force. Extra cudos must go to Sevan for making not one but two tutus (sorry!) and Maria for bagging a bin bag tutu!

The kids may not have got the tutu memo, probably because they don’t know what a memo is. But 50 runners got the message to show up and run round Pitshanger Park - bravo!

It wasn’t just a tutu day, it was also a marshal day, timekeeper day and tailwalker day. The latter featuring a pirouetting Stef, still quite taken by sporting his tutu.

Mrs I has a lot to sort out in the conservatory : religious items she is going to give so that is goes back to the church, church items that will be as per her religion needs either to be buried or burnt in a proper way(her choice) and then the remaining that will go to the bin. Today was setting a sorting area so we made space to put a separator from her main lounge and a table to lay out the items we sort together. In the meantime she said she received the local council NewsletterFebruary 2026 edition) which I have seen earlier in the week with Lager Can on the front page with our local hero and Goodgym friend Jacqui with her husband. We talked about it and was surprised what Goodgym and Lager Can do in the community and she was not aware of the amount of charity work happening in Ealing. She already has more space to walk in and out of the conservatory, plus can sit and sort some items when I am not there.

There didn't sound like there was much to do at Mr J's flat. He'd been having trouble keeping on top of things a few months ago when he was referred for help to declutter. Since then, he'd worked through the backlog himself, leaving Kash, Sevan and Mr J wondering how GoodGym could help him. At first, Mr J directed them to a pile of clothes that could go for donation, then, he remembered that there was a "storage" room where things went to be dealt with later.

The storage room sounded promising, so Mr J asked them to organise it by putting similar things together and making it look less like everything had been dumped there. During the mission, Kash and Sevan learned than Mr J had had an adventurous life. He had a trade which he'd worked in until retirement. He also knew how to have fun in his free time.

"I've been under the water diving and above the ground paragliding."
"I love to travel too. I've been all over and I loved India the most." - Mr J

In the spare room, Mr J first introduced Kash and Sevan to a memento from someone else's travels. A pirate chest, apparently from the 1820s. The treasure inside was long gone, unfortunately, so Mr J left the pair to work through the other boxes, bags and envelopes in the room by themselves.

Kash and Sevan found all manner of things from Mr J's life, discovering that he was an intentional and unintentional collector. He had sets of stamps, coins, photos and postcards from his travels, watches and clocks, all deliberately kept. He was very keen on his timepieces. There were also old mobile phones going back to the early 2000s, ceramic pieces and old hearing aids that had just hung around. Kash found containers to group Mr J's belongings together, creating a box for paperwork, for photos, for stamps and for random other bits and bobs.

By the end of the mission Mr J's storage room had become less daunting, meaning that he could now find similar items and sort through them in his own time. Two bags of rubbish had been removed too, which was a huge help for Mr J as he'd been housebound for the last 6 months.