Tonight we were back helping Home Start East Berkshire with their Slough Allotment Project.

We had the task of digging up the grass on plot 5 and with 9 of us in tow we managed to get two beds over turned.

It was great to have Priya return for her second task.

We were so pleased to have Mansoor join us via Stoke Park Active - thank you Clare for bringing Mansoor along.

The task was pretty straightforward but with very dry soil it took allot of effort in turning it over.

Jason had a cracking technique at skimming the top then digging the grass roots out accompanied by Keith who also gave the task some backbone!

Kam and Jean who I classify as my gardening gnome it alls knew exactly what to dig and what to leave!

Thank you all for your efforts tonight.

Next week is bank holiday Monday but the session is still on - we will be combining a fitness session with a litter pick task at Upton Court Park.

I had great eggs-pectations from the team tonight and they didn’t let me down!

We had a nice chilled out task today of filling knitted chicks with eggs for Alexander Devine Hospice and their Big Chick Knit campaign. We needed a nice warm indoor space to do this task and very kindly Clare offered her venue at Stoke Park Trust and as a bonus she invited some of her team to join us.. winner winner chicken dinner!

We are as chick as thieves and wanted to get started on the task as quickly as possible but before we could do that we had to do a warm up of course! So with a nice gentle warm up of walking to lunging to arm swinging we were egg-cited to start.

We had the best table to work on too! One covered in egg like balls also known as a pool table!

Working around the cluck

You better watch your behavior or you’ll get eggs-pelled from the group - actually that would never happen so we worked extra hard to be naughty! Each chick was given a name … egg-stra challenge was that it had to start with D (for duck!… because they looked more like ducks!)

The names started off easily enough… we had a Derek, a Doug and a Dickie… we then went deep to our roots and chose names from our cultures (or near enough)… so we had Punjabi ducks called Davinder and Daljeet, Iranian duck called Darius, Irish duck called Darragh, Bengali ducks called Devajani, Muslim ducks called Daniel and good old British ducks called Dave!

We worked slowly but surely and soon had all the chicks (aka ducks) filled so it was time for the fitness fun to begin.

Best of cluck!

In pairs we worked around the room working on 4 exercises from agility ladder to med ball halos to lat pull downs and overhead raises..

Followed by a good old party game of musical chairs!

Well done to Hamid for being the ‘Champion’

Thank you all for getting involved in tonight’s task.

Next week we are at St Mary’s Church on Church St helping with a spring clean (meet up point is Upton Court park at 6:30pm)

This was our first task helping Kate and Alice from the Not Just a Store shop in Slough. This community initiative was set up last year and has been supporting Slough residents with low cost food/household items as well as a community fridge.

Imagine a charity shop that was not clothes, but food instead!! That’s us.

Here's a bit more about Not Just from their website :-

This is a fundraising community store for our non-profit NotJUST (International) CIC. We work with distributors all over the UK that end up with food and items that are past best before and surplus, and save it from landfill in bulk. The food is then sorted into our food banks, sharing with smaller community groups, and going into stores like this!

This store is a social supermarket that is open to every member of the public: no membership required. A lot of our food is past its best before, and a lot of our food and items are sold at a discounted price. We also have some items ‘available for a donation’, where you can choose how much you wish to donate. It’s entirely up to you, but the more you donate, the more people in crisis we can help. We also run a community fridge, filled with goodies also available for a donation.

'It's a sin' to waste so much food when it is perfectly edible and this is just the type of waste warriors task we like!

I first touched base with the store back in November when I went to have a little nosey at the store and introduce GoodGym to the team. We then went our separate ways until December when we reunited at the Slough CVS Community Network event. The Not Just team were 'Always on my mind' so it was great to go say Hi again and see if they had a task for us. And low and behold they did!

You'll need a big team

Said Alice!

With 19 attendees we did not let her down!

It was great to have Ryan return for his 2nd task. A very warm welcome to Vineet and Sheena on their 1st task, and thank you to Clare from Stoke Park Active for bringing her team members down for this task - their very 1st GoodGym experience (welcome to Salman, Mansoor, Ray and Michelle). We had other important numbers floating around today....Huge congratulations to Sara on her 250th good deed today. Sara has been supporting Slough since we launched in 2018. She was our Queen shopper during Covid, a community missioner with a passion and our mission making possible member (helping older people with one off tasks) and she has always been an integral member of our team - well done on your 250th.

On Sunday Pam knocked out her 350th good deed, very closely followed by her 351st and today her 352nd. Known affectionately as Ninja Pam, Pam again has been a core member since 2018. We wouldn't know what do to without Pam's gardening knowledge and general calmness. Thank you for all our efforts over the years.

Thank you to Claire for coming over from the Windsor and Maidenhead GG Team - great to meet you

The Task:

I popped in to see Kate earlier today to see the areas we would be working on. This helped me work out the run/walk route as well - only question I had was do we Go West or east?...lets go west... I decided on a shorter route today as my lunchtime run left me with frozen ears! I did wonder 'What have I done to deserve this? Then I remembered that I run for pleasure!

At the warm up which Hamid did so very well...we all decided on a walk from Greggs to Costa. Ruth lead the walkers whilst I back marked. Our total time out walking was around 20 minutes. We all just wanted to get back as quick as possible for the warmth of inside where we met Kate and she gave us the lowdown of the tasks.

We had two areas to concentrate on today:

• Creation of the Pet Shop area;
• Sweeping and mopping of the 'football' sized space upstairs

I knew Sara would be great at leading the Pet Shop area as she likes pets! haha...no point having me there! And Sweeping Sandy and Rocking Ruth helped to lead the upstairs task. With so many of us in attendance at times, there was a bit of 'Domino Dancing' going on but both teams did a great job of their respective tasks.

The Pet Shop Boys (and girls) did a smashing job at banging the back panels in place before fitting the shelves. Vineet and Sheena got stuck into this task with excellent guidance from everyone expect me...I'm clueless at coming up with racking suggestions. Agnija (our birthday girl) managed to source a hammer and banged the panels in place. Overall, the team made a shelf-improvement to how it looked at the beginning.

The Va Va Broom team upstairs had mastered a team method at sweeping (put two brushes together and Bob's your uncle...a greater area is covered). They then cracked on with mopping the floor. What a mop-tastic job they did!

The Broom Challenge

Our fitness part of the session tonight was a game of chase the broom. The team stood in a circle each holding a broom stick in their right hand, on the call of 'go', they had to release their broom and as quickly as they could grab the broom of the person on their left. If you didn't get to the broom in time you were out. Well done to Ryan and Hamid for making it to the final. Our eventual winner was Hamid!

The January challenge

Thank you to everyone getting involved in the January challenge. We met our good deeds target on Sunday and have now exceeded it thanks to all our attendees tonight. Well done team #GGSlough. Just got to get that 750km distance target met now (half way there!)

There are still plenty of January sessions to get involved in. See you at one!