Mrs J's late husband was the computer whizz. Mrs J had worked a secretary in the past and she'd never gotten to grips with the relatively new Windows 10 laptop at home. She still held a fondness for her old, chunky Sony laptop that had stopped working. Now, with Mr J no longer able to help, it was time for the 96 year old Mrs J to learn some new skills.

Getting a laptop set up for an older person to use was challenging for Kash and Sevan. They had to make setting changes as they went to make it easier to read or to use, which left Mrs J's head spinning. She must've felt like she was at the optician.

"Do you prefer accessibility option A or B?"
"A...?"
"...or B?"

There were some things that the GoodGymers couldn't change, like adding physical, clicky buttons under the trackpad. They did what they could. Mrs J was still unsure though and her eyes and brain needed a rest, so with her laptop configured, the next session to help should be easier.

Sevan and Kash decided to spend their day of GoodGymming in three different boroughs outside their home area of Ealing. After leaving the Chiswick Eyot in GoodGym Hounslow, before it got cut off from the dry land by the Thames high tide, they continued their journey eastward. The 3.5 km run took them to GoodGym Hammersmith & Fulham, where Mr A awaited their help with sweeping leaves in his tiny back garden.

"I don't know how you are going to do that without a shovel. Last year, a man came with a shovel to do it." - Mr A.

The GoodGymers also learned that their predecessor was an Englishman proficient in gardening. Since neither of them was an English gardener, there was no point in measuring themselves to such distant standards. They decided to simply get on with the job. Kash went downstairs to evaluate the difficulty of that seemingly insurmountable task.

"We will just do it with our hands." - Kash.

As it turned out, Mr A had brooms and dustpans, so using only hands was not even necessary. In 30 minutes, Sevan and Kash swept and packed up not only dried leaves, but also all the creeping weeds they had pulled out, then they moved six sacks of green waste to the front garden. Unbeleafable!

For this time we had quite a team with Sevan, Kash, Maria and Amy joining us from Ealing! Most of use were here early, joining the existing volunteers of Thames 21. They publish these events broadly and as a result, on top of regular, they always have a few new faces as well, one of them who came all the way from... Stratford! We also meet Annie who has been joining the a few of the Eyot missions by herself until now. After a long and detailed briefing, covering the ins and out of Balsam, we depart towards the Eyot, equipped with Thames Mud Proof Wellies. Despite the sunny weather of the past few days the mud is as sticky as usual, since the Thames tide never stop. Getting into the island, we spread thin as each person hunt for Balsam. The bravest ones, such as Sevan, go and open up a new path in the middle of nowehre to hunt for the invasive one. After a couple of hours of slashing, searching and uprooting the team finally disband as some of us need to go to the next task. A nice bounty from this session!

Friend of GoodGym and LDN Tube Runner, Claire, is taking on the infamous Comrades Marathon in South Africa. As well as taking on this huge challenge, Claire's taking a bag of pre-loved running shoes with life left in them to donate to local runners from disadvantaged communities. Some of these folk can do 400km/month run-commuting because they can't afford public transport.

And this is where GoodGym comes in! Four of our runners who might possibly have more running shoes than are strictly required hunted through their shoe boxes!

Harvey collected the shoes, making use of old packaging, and met up with Claire for the official handover. Coffee may have been involved.

Claire will now transport our old shoes to the southern hemisphere, where they'll be cleaned up, and make sure they find new owners who'll get many more miles out of them!