Today we donned our headtorches and high-viz and beat the curfew by delivering flyers for our friends at Flos.

The flyers were mostly for their wonderful refill shop - encouraging people in the local area to shop local, support a local business and reduce their single use plastics.

Meg brought an excellent flyering tool in the form of a trusty spatula and showed us a "fold and shove" process that protects fingertips and knuckles from letterboxes! Something to remember for our next flyering task!

Our GoodGym May morning extravaganza finished with a task in the garden of Flo's The Place in the Park - a local community hub and delightful cafe. Thomas was awarded the Garland of Joy to wear throughout the session in celebration of reaching 10 Good Deeds. Well done Thomas!

We had weeding to do and a pirate ship to paint (as you do), and 13 bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived GoodGymers to do it. Holly and Katie got the yarn-bombing task of cordoning off the pirate ship while the varnish dried with brightly coloured knitting wool. Hazard tape is so 2021. The rest of us divided up between weeding and pruning the garden, or sanding and varnishing the pirate ship. A break for complimentary coffee and pastries kept us with enough energy to get through til 11am despite the early start for May morning celebrations, and we're pretty sure we didn't weed anything that shouldn't be weeded.

A successful 1st task of May!

After a rainy start to the morning, the sun came out as we walked through the gate of Flo's - a good omen indeed! We started off with some weeding and raking up the autumn leaves to clear some space for new plants, with small breaks to move a large pile of sticks and a children's slide(!) Then, after a delicious coffee from the cafe (thank you Flo's!) we planted bulbs and small flowers. We put violas along the front of the cafe, and pansies by the entrance gate, with daffodils underneath, ready to emerge in the Spring.

It was sadly too wet to paint the small kitchen set for children- maybe a job for next time!

A quartet of GoodGym gardeners joined the Flo's gardening team to get some work done in the outside space ahead of the cafe restarting outdoor dining next week.

We dismantled a dried out willow fence, moved picnic benches into place, put together parasol bases, set up a freecycle station, flattened and recycled a pile of cardboard, planted lavender, chopped back (but failed to dig up - as testified by the bent fork prong) a bush in the flower bed, and started the process of weaving new willow fronds to create a new flowerbed fence.

We now consider ourselves East Oxford's premier willow weaving experts.

Sadly, we failed to avoid snow and hail, but since we also had plenty of sunshine we'll call it a draw.

Hot drinks on-the-house were a delightful perk - thank you for a lovely couple of hours Flo's!

Anwen and I spent a very lovely hour laying turf for the Naturescape project in Florence Park. Naturescape is a new project, which is transforming the old mini golf course into a interactive nature space for the whole community - www.naturescapeoxford.co.uk.

We managed to lay a whole pallet of wild-flower rich turf and then had celebratory falafel from The Syrian Sisters afterwards.

Volunteers worked in pairs from the same household/bubble. Alex's bubble took the hour before us, and Sarah's went along later in the day.

They float through the park with the greatest of ease
The Goodgym crew off to do many good deeds
Their movements were graceful, Makena they pleased
Then rewarded by watching the flying trapeze

Sing along!

Flo's The Place in the Park have been given permission to take over the old Bowls pavilion next to their main building for a 6 month trial period, so tonight it was all hands on deck to get it renovated and ready for community use. With only 6 months to prove they can make good use of it there is no time or budget to waste to get it spruced up!

Tooling up with masking tape, sand paper, screw drivers, paint rollers, brushes and sponges, the Goodgym team set to work. Bethan and Laura took on the kitchen space, sanding smooth the polyfiller (getting dusty bums in the process), then moving on to painting the walls. Meanwhile, the remaining quartet headed to the changing room to dismantle old shelving, masking tape the edges of the benches and mirror (mind the spiders!), and then set to painting the walls.

Newly discovered fitness session: Unscrewing shelves from the wall with a manual screw-driver in a warm room is surprisingly sweat inducing!

45 minutes later and a little paint-speckled, we had taken down 2 shelves, sanded one wall, masking taped the edges of 2 rooms, painted 5 walls, dodged many spiders, and cleaned up our rollers to finish.

After a quick stop to admire the trapeze lessons next door, we set off back to base, pausing for partner sit-ups and planks in a shady corner of the park.

This task definitely needs more visits to get the pavilion ready to use, so keep your eyes on the website for updates.