I was especially glad to return to Islington today as I was scheduled to do a repeat gardening mission for Mr J (the details of last year's mission can be found here). I was joined on today's endeavour by the awesome Natasha, and today's mission marks both her first mission and her first good deed! Woot woot! 🎉🎉 Awesome work! 😄

Since our visit last year, Mr J has found that sitting out his garden has helped lift his mood when he's been feeling depressed. He's also been making efforts to keep the patio weeded. However, he was temporarily moved to a bed and breakfast earlier this year following a flood, and consequently the garden ran a bit rampant. He asked GoodGym if we could help him get back on top of it again.

After greeting Mr J, I was pleased to see that despite the problems he's had over the last year, he seems much happier and more comfortable in himself. I was also pleased to see that he remembered me, and had fond memories of the work we did last year. Things like that are always so lovely to hear! 😄

After exchanging these initial greetings with Mr J, Natasha and I got stuck into the task (Natasha sans gardening gloves). This mostly involved pulling up weeds (handily enough for the glove-less, no brambles! 😄👍), while trying to avoid the snails and spiders that weren't working hard enough to avoid us 😬

This collection of fauna gave Natasha a proper initiation into the GoodGym experience, although her real initiation moment was probably when a spider ran up her leg 😅 This happened after I'd told her that I'd read an article alleging that most of the spiders we see are sex-crazed males. I don't know if it helped that this spider-touch probably came from something resembling affection, but it at least gave an explanation for this motivation of this erratic arachnid in scaling her leg.

As for myself, my own "ew" moment came in the form of a baby snail riding on top of a big snail along the handle of my tool, which had only been on the floor for 30 seconds!!! (I mean, why?!) Given that it must have moved at almost breakneck speed to get onto that handle, I was both impressed and terrified in equal measure.

After less than 90 minutes of work, Natasha and I had finished and we showed Mr J the results. He was very happy with what we'd done, and we stayed to chat with him for a few minutes more before making our goodbyes (I had to leg it for the bus 😅).

Lovely working with you, Natasha: I hope you enjoyed your first mission, and that I'll see you on another relatively soon 😄