This month's visit to Alice Park saw us continuing work on the new path which we'd made a start on last month.

With seven pairs of hands this time, we made fairly quick work of digging out the trench in the line of the path, ready for future bark chipping. And also started off the fencing down on side of that by hammering in stakes at regular intervals.

After a refreshment break, some of us joined in the community session of Christmas wreath making which was also going on today.

Watch this space for more path updates from future sessions...

This weekend, at a secret location in Bath, Santa’s elves are hard at work making Christmas special for around 1,500 children and young people with mental health issues. Today they were joined by six Goodgymers. At least the red and white GG T-shirt is somewhat Santa-like.

Most children wake up on Christmas morning to a wealth of presents and a wonderful time with their families. Imagine how hard it must be to be cut off from all that, having to spend the holiday on a mental health ward. Pretty bleak. But a Bath charity has made it a mission to bring those young people a little seasonal magic.

Christmas for CAMHS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services) was set up by Dr Ro Bevan - seen here giving the briefing - who saw the piles of presents donated to children’s wards of general hospitals while CAMHS units were largely forgotten. The charity stepped into the gap and, thanks to fundraising and impressive organisational skills, young people in mental health care across the country now receive gifts tailored to them. Even the wards get something like sports equipment or a big board game. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the unit that got a set of boxing gloves!

And the gifts really do help. One young patient told the charity that they made them feel less alone.

That’s why, for one weekend only, a community hall in the city had been transformed into Santa’s workshop. We were part of a small army of volunteers unpacking, sorting, picking and packing mountains of presents, ranging from crafts and cuddly toys to sensory stuff and socks.

Clipboards were out in force and those familiar song lyrics, “He’s making a list and checking it twice “ came into their own.

It was a huge relief to learn that we didn’t have to wrap the presents. That’s done on the ward - paper supplied by Christmas for CAMHS of course.

A big GoodGym welcome to Pippa and Ange on their first missions - they truly have the ‘gift’. And a festive cheer for Jer who not only stayed on afterwards to help but also wore the most amazing Christmas jumper.

And that’s a wrap! (Or not…)

On a night of ghosts and ghoulies, 3 intrepid spirits ventured into the darkness of the Skyline loop for a terrorific, tricksy treat of a torchlit trail run.

👻👻👻

Not put off by werewolf threat, vampire peril, a bit of rain, nor forgotten running kit we slipped and slid into the night to continue this Halloween tradition started by GoodGym Bath a year ago almost to the day.

Watch out for more trail runs in the coming weeks… 😱

Today we did our bit to clean up the environment for a future generation.

Specifically, we did some general garden/playground maintenance for one of our local nursery schools.

First we had to clear away some fallen and rotting apples.

Next, we we given some bags of top soil with which we topped up some old tyres to act as borders and/or stepping stones.

Those were the headline tasks, but being GoodGym we ticked them off in record time, so were given various other tasks. Various areas of weeding, tidying away toys, sweeping, Rachel even managed to fit in some carpet laying.

Congrats!

To Rachel for good deed number 50. We'll look out for the black GoodGym shirt in the near future! 👀