Another weedy street in Southville, another Tuesday evening opportunity for GoodGym Bristol to get stuck in!

Having opted out of glyphosate all year, some of the Southville gutters and pavements are very weedy which can also lead to blocked drains, so manual effort to keep the rainwater flowing is the order of the day.

Sweeping and scraping, a little bit if hacking and the longest, clumpiest piece if weed ever, lots of chat and the odd cat, many gutters and wall edges were all spruced up by the time we were due to run (or walk) away again.

Lits of lively chat sat outside at Workout and then a blast of DIYSOS getting a lorry stuck and the successfully pulling it out - jeopardy indeed.

See tiu all for more next week!

Part 2 of leafleting for this weekend's Picnic in the Park with runners and walkers pounding the streets of St Werburghs, St Agnes and St Pauls - all very saintly.

With new maps and a stock of leaflets, letterboxes were targeted (after a quick fig at the Community Centre) with a bizarre number of fake/sealed letterboxes out to fool us.

The walking group had an unexpectedly sharp stop to leafleting when Caroline slid over on a piece of wood, twisting her ankle. As someone who doesn't have Uber on her phone (I know, right?!), it was a call to an actual taxi company and having to use road names instead of a dropped pin for location. Old School!

With a bit more leafleting and Caroline on her way home, Jason had an unexpected run back to Workout to reunite with Melanie and the runners Richard, Ed and Cameron and Darren who'd managed to find some energy after a long day at work with no lunch.

After establishing Senegal is hosting the YOUTH Olympics, not the WINTER Olympics, conversation moved to Ed's preferred and least sought after volunteering roles - our money's on drug testing again. But good lick with the half marathon in the meantime.

It was full-on Bristol after a weekend of Harbour Festival loveliness to see hot air balloons back in the sky with the International Balloon Fiesta a few weekends away (and a cancellation of Ashton Court parkrun - you've been warned!). The general GoodGym rule of "see balloon, must point" was well-practised by the group of 5 walkers and 7 runners who'd joined forces to help clear some Southville Ward streets of weeds and save them from Bristol Waste's glyphosate.

Roddy found us by searching for the red t-shirts, Frances caught us up by searching for the right red t-shirts (there's no pulling the wool over Frances' eyes) and we all found the wheelbarrow of tools and made a plan after only five or so minutes chatting.

We were soon tacking the weeds on Murray Street, off Catherine Mead Street (not necessarily names after this Catherine Mead, but she's in the Academy of Cheese so deserves the name-check), Cameron making great in-roads beyond the parked car and Tom (named after the first King of Croatia, obviously) was a pro with the long-handled weeder-knife-thing, putting Vaguely Northern Darren's short-handled weeder-knife-thing to shame. Roddy was great at scooping up the piles of weeds and dusty dirt pulled out and swept up by the assembled mass of GoodGymmers.

Despite what the photos might suggest, Richards B and G worked really hard, too and Caroline, Jason and Helen seemed to have a race to fill the bin bags as quickly as possible so we soon ran out of official bin bag space and resorted to domestic bags.

All the bags were moved to the normal Bristol Waste pick-up spot, where we took credit for a number of green bags already there, Bristol waster will be thoroughly confused as we'd used clear (recycling) bags for the green waster and some of the green (non-recyclables) bags were blatantly full of drinks cans and bottles. Such a dilemma!

A great, if once again slightly warm, evening, finishing with a drink by the harbour at Workout where Caroline had a HUGE jug of oat milk with her pot of tea, we established everyone's birth month except Frances who protects her privacy with aplomb, and wished Ed well on his adventures to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow for his wardrobe-enhancing volunteering stint (and he's no longer on the naughty step, if anyone's asking).

See you all next week?