Tonight I met up with cosmically cool Carol for a mission in Southwark for Mr A.

Mr A has been in hospital for the last three weeks following a fall in his home. In anticipation of his release, his wife (Mrs A) wanted to get rid of some excess furniture (to allow him more space to manoeuvre) and to replace some decorative door hangings that he'd damaged in previous falls (because nomenclature is important to me, I looked it up: these type of hangings are a form of portière 😎👍). GoodGym were asked if we could help with this.

After introducing ourselves to Mrs A, we got to work!

First item on the agenda was to move a leather armchair out of the flat so that it may be collected. This was surprisingly light (or maybe two-seater leather recliners on previous missions have schooled us well): We were done in a jiffy.

Next came the job of removing a large standalone television and base. This looked scary, but was definitely much lighter than anticipated. That also went down and out with relative ease. Surely a mission couldn't be this straightforward?!

Last on our task list was to replace the decorative hangings. This was fun: Not only did Carol do a lot of (all) the hammering-while-standing-on-a-ladder bits that make me think of all of the interesting ways in which you could hurt yourself, we also got to chat about mission types in general. It was during this chat that I issued the fateful words: "I love building flat pack, but they just take so long!", while Carol talked about how much she loved tasks that required dexterity.

[It's not difficult to see where this segue is going: Statements like that when the world is golden are to Fate as red flags are allegedly to bulls.]

Hangings hung (and hanging pretty true, despite the lack of a spirit level while Carol hammered into the architrave), we asked if that was everything we could do for Mrs A.

It turned out that Mrs A also had a fan that needed assembling. It had screws, multiple parts, and a set of instructions that was only an exploded view. Although we knew that we didn't have to do it, we decided to go ahead with building it anyway (I mean, I still love flat pack 😄). With Carol's dexterity, my screwdriver, and a joint willingness to ignore a couple of leftover fastenings that we're reasonably confident would only affect the operation of the fan if it was being operated while also being swung continuously at a high rate of rotation, we got it done (Carol said during this part that she was my greatest fan, but I think that was mission delierum talk (i.e. when everyone speaks in puns). I suffered from a similar mission delierum, which peaked when I asked Carol if her fan-building environment could be called a dextrous labour-atory).

Finishing up, we gave some advice about requesting a home assessment for receiving a hospital bed, made our goodbyes, and were soundly kissed on the cheek by Mrs A for our help. I think we were all fans of Mrs A after this! 😄 Hopefully she can help get Mr A the support he needs when he comes home (in addition to the crispy fish that he's been dreaming of in hospital).

It was fun working with you, Carol! See you for Dharmesh's 100th good deed on Monday! 😄✌️