Sevan and Kash had visited Mrs R in Shepherd’s Bush a year and a half ago for a hedge trimming task. Back then, the lady had lived upstairs and struggled to keep all the neighbours happy: some complained about her hedge getting out of control, others were disgruntled about GoodGymers making too radical cuts to it. This year, it turned out, Mrs R had moved downstairs following a fire in her previous flat. That meant one of the neighbours was no longer on the list of people to please, but the challenge of keeping the hedge and the tree in the front garden trimmed remained. Unfortunately, Mrs R has lost her tools in the incident in her upstairs flat, so Sevan and Kash couldn’t do any cutting back and had to find another job.

Mrs R thought that moving heavy pots with plants to the back garden would be a good alternative to improve accessibility for her wheelchair, bin men, the ambulance crew and the firefighters. The lady learned the hard way that large pots obstructing the path to the front door and the windows posed a serious safety risk for someone like her.

Mrs R must have felt much better than the week before when Steph had paid her a visit and had transformed an even more chaotic space into a neat, tidy garden. She asked for a chair and spent the whole session with Sevan and Kash in the front garden, instructing them and telling stories about how important gardening had been in her family.

”It’s such a lovely day to do this today!” - Mrs R.

The older lady was a keen gardener, in love with roses and lilies of all colours you could imagine. She’s been a winner of an award for the best garden in West London for four years, just like her dad, a gardener, had been winning prizes for his work. Mrs R believed that the art of gardening would keep her children out of trouble, so she taught them to get busy in the garden and stay away from the gangs. Together, they grew not only flowering plants. They also had a cherry tree and a veg bed with potatoes, aubergines, footlong cucumbers and four types of chillies - impressive!

Back in the present, Sevan and Kash were staying out of trouble, exercising their muscles and brains in an effort to transport all the pots worth keeping (a.k.a. the heaviest ones) to the backyard. Some of the pots they carried without emptying individually, others were carried in tandem. There were pots that had to be rolled over the carpet through the house, making a terrible mess (which Mrs R had accepted). Finally, for the really big boys, Sevan and Kash decided on emptying them. The best soil made it to the back garden in plastic buckets, where Kash had re-planted six rose bushes the GoodGymes had uprooted from the largest pots. What initially looked like a mammoth task for strongmen has been achieved by two Ealing GoodGymers, even the miraculous transport of a rosemary plant with the soil after its pot fell apart!

”You've got to have faith” - commented Mrs R, George Michael-style.

Sevan and Kash finished the session with a bit of sweeping and separating the rubbish from the pots worth giving away, which they had left in front of Mrs R’s garden for interested (and able to lift!) people to collect.

To reach the Care4Calais on late Sunday morning, Sevan and Kash ran from Acton up and down Hanger Hill. At the task location, they met James, who had arrived for his first task in Ealing. The fourth musketeer slot had been filled by one of Tamzin's recent regular volunteers who himself lived in a hotel for asylum seekers that Care4Calais supported.

The challenge task owner Tamzin had this spring was the abundance of stock (partially due to other C4C storage spaces handing her their goods) and a halved number of requests from the hotels. Those were generally good problems to have.

Sevan joined Tamzin in making custom packs, while Kash, James and the third volunteer sorted through loads of women's and men's clothes. If you think the abundance of outfits made it easier for Sevan to find a t-shirt for a woman who had requested it, think again. He had to dig through the layers of tangled long-sleeved tops in the overflowing boxes and couldn't even reach the most suitable one, which must have been buried underneath.

Meanwhile, for the sorting crew, the task of putting filtered clothes away was the main challenge: squeezing things in, finding the overflow bags for the surplus items and making new containers for clothes that were impossible to fit anywhere. Despite having to virtually bend the rules of physics to find homes for all the outfits, the team smashed sorting the whole huge batch of donations in two hours!

Notable finds:

• Christmas-themed Elf movie pyjamas
• An elf hat
• Skull socks (sadly, not suitable for refugees)
• A straw fedora hat
• African headscarves
• A Minion's costume

Ms E had been living in her house for more than thirty years, but over the last three, she had been battling to have two tall trees trimmed. The trees had been growing in the neighbouring property, but kept dropping large branches regardless of the boundaries, even destroying Ms E's shed in the past. After years of anticipation, the overgrown branches finally came down, but - with them - a few planks off Ms E's fence.

The lady requested GoodGym's help with the repair, and Sevan and Kash from West London responded to the call. The task was a puzzle for all three, who were trying to figure out what the fence looked like before the neighbour's makeshift fixes, what parts were missing, what they could be replaced with, and how to piece together broken planks. After a lot of thought and trying things out, three planks found their place back on the fence, concealing an unsightly gap. The rest could no longer be attached to anything, and the GoodGymers had to give up there.

The remaining time of the mission was used to pull out and bag blue alkanet and trim a neighbouring plant invading Ms E's garden. Ms E concluded that GoodGym's help was brilliant, and even the presence of people coming to help her cheered her up!

Sevan's story

Kash and Sevan's first E of the day, Mrs E, had them stumped for a while. Mrs E was moving out and had inherited items from a number of relatives who'd passed away. She needed to sort through the items that she'd inherited before moving so she needed to get access to them.

All of the clothes to be sorted were in the loft and Mrs E was sure that the pole to open the loft hatch was nearby. Kash and Sevan hunted high and low and there was no sign of it. They were stuck, so they thought about alternatives.

1. Could one give the other a punt up to the high ceiling? Maybe, but one of them wasn't keen
2. Could they create a makeshift pole from things lying around? Apparently not
3. Did Mrs E have a ladder? Yes!

Kash went to find Mrs E's step ladder and returned with something very short, leaving Sevan still 20cm away from unlocking the hatch. Mrs E said that there was a bigger ladder hiding somewhere, which Kash found. It was so tall that Kash could reach the high ceiling herself and drop the ladder down.

Finally able to start the search for clothes in the loft, Sevan climbed up and looked around, finding lots of bags and suitcases. Some were empty, some contained documents, one was full of video tapes and plenty had clothing, curtains and blankets. Mrs E's priority were the last groups, so those fabrics were slowly moved into Mrs E's spare bedroom.

Mrs E believed that there wasn't much more in the loft, except for some pots and pans. Kash and Sevan brought them down too, plus 48 toilet rolls that Mrs E wouldn't otherwise be able to get to.

There were still plenty of items left in the loft, so Sevan described what was there and showed Mrs E some photos. She was surprised as she thought that the GoodGymers had more or less emptied the space.

Kash and Sevan closed the loft hatch the same way that they'd opened it and walked to their next E of the day. Ms E, who lived not too far away.

Kash's story

A black and white cat jumped off the bed as Mrs E got up to search for a stick to open the loft. The attic hid years of history the lady hadn’t seen for a long time - and probably wasn’t looking forward to seeing. The previous year was a devastating time, when Mrs E, already struck with illness, lost several family members, and now had to move out of the property. And now that stick - the key to the past that had to leave the house together with Mrs E - was nowhere to be found.

Two strangers who came all the way from West London to help Mrs E, and introduced themselves as Sevan and Kash, couldn’t find the stick either. But they had an idea. A long step ladder they found in the kitchen let them reach the high ceiling and open the treasury of Mrs E's family history. The lady asked them to bring down any clothes, bedding, glassware and dishes they could find in the loft and organise them into suitcases and black bags to keep in one of the bedrooms.

The carrier bags currently storing the belongings in the attic were so fragile that they’ve been falling apart in Sevan and Kash’s hands before making it to the lower floor. But the two had ideas to remedy that, and patiently repacked the items into sturdier bags that could be safely carried down.

Ninety minutes of problem-solving and moving things around brought the most important items to the spare bedroom for Mrs E to go through. That concluded the first chapter of reviving the family history. Mrs E was grateful to have people to help her with what would otherwise be impossible on her difficult journey to the past. Video cassettes, lampshades, carpets and bags of sandpaper will have to wait in the loft for the next adventurers who will dare to venture to the further corners of Mrs E’s past.

Today was the day for GoodGym's annual spring session in Elthorne Triangle with HANGOT. Like previous years, the aim was to prepare the fruit trees and walnut tree in the orchard to give the local community the best chance of picking some fruit in the summer. The difference this year was that the 10 amazing GoodGymers present blitzed through the task with half an hour to spare.

The session started with a GoodGym classic, mulching! Unlike last month's session with HANGOT, the wood chip was sitting at the top of the hill instead of the bottom, so today team had the slightly easier task of wheeling it down to the trees in need and spreading it around the trunks.

In the orchard, Mirjam, one of the long running HANGOT members, was giving GoodGymers and others lessons about the orchard. They learned some interesting facts about the weeds that the team were tackling:

"You can tell this is hemlock because of the purple splodges on its stems."
"Where you see it, there can be up to 7 years worth of seeds in the ground already."
"That means we need to catch it early, before it seeds, for 7 years to kill it off." - Mirjam

So all of the hemlock and burdock, no matter how small, needed to be found and chopped. Iram took special pleasure in slicing young burdock stems after being attacked by it at last month's task. Surprisingly, the team also learned that nettles are actually good for something:

"The nettles are good for increasing biodiversity."
"That will enable children to come to the orchard as an educational space." - Mirjam
"Do you mean educating them not to touch the nettles?" - Sevan

Despite the breaks taken for bad jokes, the team made fast progress. With the areas around the trees mulched and the unwanted weeds chopped, everyone was wondering what the next job was. There wasn't one. The team had ticked off everything on HANGOT's list in a hour, so they went early to a local coffee shop for today's social.

Great work everyone!