GoodGym Bath made another trip to St John's court to help put up their Chrimbo deckies.

This has become an annual outing for us over the past few years, and once again we decked out 3 rooms to help brighten the place for the festive period.

In total we erected 3 Christmas trees, loads of dangly thingies, and about a million* lights. Lovely.

* actual figure may vary

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…)

OK, so it's almost winter now and it's no longer warm anymore, but we are all grateful for blue skies and sunshine when on a GoodGym mission. This was one of those mornings, air crisp and chilly but warming under a late Autumn sun.

Five GoodGymmers arrived at one of our favourite locations, the walled garden at Newton St Loe. This Grow for Life project has been ongoing for the last couple of years and aims to be completed by 2025. Grow for Life's purpose is to provide social and therapeutic gardening sessions for people affected by low confidence, anxiety, depression or isolation.

In attendance to help was the ever enthusiastic Wayne who greeted Stephen, Jane, Natalie, Mark and Meyrick. Always prepared, he told us what he needed us to do that morning and we set to work.

A considerable amount of wood chip needed redistributing, some of it initially along the top by the main wall, let's call it a 'rampart'. If I could understand some of Wayne's grand vision, there will be trees and a path along here, and it is towards that goal that we added progress.

Elsewhere wood chip needed laying down over well worn paths throughout the garden. Whilst helping with this, barrowing and distributing, I took my eyes of the work that was going on at the top, but I believe Jane (to whom we are very grateful for continuing to organise this mission), took on the mighty bindweed.

Towards the end, inevitably, manure was involved. Horse manure to be exact. We reworked the compost piles, turning them upside down and layering them with woodchip, greens and horse manure before signing off with whatever we wanted to harvest from the garden.

Due to meteorological good fortune, the heavy rain of overnight gave way for a few hours on Saturday morning, perfectly aligning with our GoodGym mission to Bath City Farm.

A firm (farm) favourite, today's outing was unusually under represented. Just two of us made it, but as GoodGymmers are superhuman this was like a small army of course.

Kate and Meyrick both arrived early, clearly eager to have that question that we all have in the back of our minds answered when visiting this wonderful farm: "Will it involve manure?"

It involved manure. At least to a certain degree. We were asked by our genial hostess if we could provide some home improvements to one of the Goat enclosures, including the interior of their 'house' by bringing as much wood chip down from the car park and laying it atop the much muddied (and pooed upon) ground.

Relatively straight forward as this sounds, the difficulty at Bath City farm is that the 'stuff' is normally at the top of the hill and the 'job' is normally near the bottom. Bit of a work out if I'm honest but I reckon we did 6 trips, with a wheelbarrow each, in the hour we were given.

Hopefully the Goats appreciated it, Pocket, Rocket, Fern and Rocky certainly seemed happy, although they did appear to be eating the new flooring.

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! 👀