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?

100% walking group this week, with a soggy meet-up but much drier session.

Walking means more chat which means many, many more tangential voyages of language and knowledge and also less time at the task so everyone grabbed tools at the Burial Ground which had turned very tall and green with fresh growth of nettles and brambles. Which were all really quite soggy.

By the time we finished up, the path in was much more accessible and we found some ripened brambles to help us build up a need for cake as we celebrated Ed's 100th good deed with a Slinky caterpillar cake that only seemed to cut into HUGE slices - which was convenient!

OK, thats a really shoe-horned pun title but you know what I mint.

Another glorious Tuesday, the first trip of the year to Dame Emily Park's fabulous Community Garden that's grown so much since we started helping out years ago. Nowadays were helping manage the space and plants that are there rather than mass clearance or compost shifting in preparation and hope that things would grow.

Poppies that had already set seed were being pulled out, fragrant herb beds were carefully weeded, willow was woven into the new hedge (and a tiny bit of trying to help the willow dome and the all-important tasting of biscuits and fruit Ursula had kindly provided to keep us going. An unexpected treat was small bits/fruits (?) of wasabi that lots of GGers were brave enough to try.

The main feature, though, was celebrating Jason's 501st good deed - a huge achievement and so much good and happiness and wellbeing shared in Bristol - well done! And there were cakes, obviously, though decamped to Bar + Block as Club Haus in Workout was closed for the evening. It felt like a really fun picnic even though we were indoors instead of overlooking the water with pots of tea. And the team at Bar + Block took it in their stride, luckily for us :-)

Ah, the joy of not meltingly hot nor drenchingly wet weather. Perfect for a spit of checking out front doors and their letterboxes to spread the word about home insulation information available at drop-in events at St Werburghs Community Centre.

Rasa and Matty (Matt/Matthew) picked a great, chatty session for their first GoodGym task and we hope to see them again soon.

Exploring bits of Bristol we've never seen before is always an added benefit of leafleting and the workout of steps and bending to ridiculously low letterboxes leads to hugely increased respect for our post people. And cats. The opportunity to stroke random cats.

The runners headed to the Centre to collect their leaflets and pick off some of the terraced streets i St Werburghs, the walkers made use of the leaflets Melanie had picked up on Monday for the first delivery session with Richard and popped to Montpelier.

Many leaflets left at residents' residences, it was off to the soon-to-close Raj on King Street for a lovely, very funny if very slow GG Eats with a stand-up robotic-specialist waiter, big spoons, vegan paneer, nutty boiled rice and many other highlights.

More GoodGymming next week?