When these run reports are late appearing it's almost always because I'm suffering from pun paralysis! That is to say we're supposed to add a pithy headline, preferably involving a clever pun of some sort. Or at the very least add a headline of any kind at all.

And some days they just won't pop in to your head. GoodGym writers' block is a real thing, you know!

Embarrassingly, this time I went to an AI chatbot for help. "Give me an apple themed pun", I lamely asked of it.

"What do you call an apple that's been bitten? A half baked idea" it came up with. Half-baked indeed!

I pointed out that this was a joke, not a pun, and learning from its mistake the chatbot did indeed offer a (terrible) pun this time.

Encouraged by this I asked "give me a few puns to pick from" and, noticing my accidental punnage in this, added "do you see what I did there?"

Chatbot did indeed pick (sorry!) up on this and offered a few lame picking-related puns this time. But the work was done by now. My own creative juices (sorry!) were once more flowing. This was my story. My scoop. Chatbots have their place, they're out of the box now and they won't be going back ... but we must use them wisely - not as creators to do the creative work for us, but as a sounding board to help spark our own imaginations.

Back to the task. Grow For Life have an orchard next to the Walled Garden we all know and love. Being an orchard of course, it's rather low maintenance. So I never even knew it was there.

But today they've invited their fans and friends - and there were indeed dozens of people in attendance - to come along and help in picking some of the apples, and also joining in the full end-to-end process of washing and sorting, mashing, and pressing juice.

A proper old-fashioned community of real humans getting together to help each other do something good and get something dome. Chatbots will never be able to do that (he writes...)

A pressing task indeed...

Five Good Gymers, not Famous, braved an early autumnal evening to My First Steps Nursery, seeking adventure.

On arrival we were greeted by Cathy and given a very quick briefing of tonight’s task: tidy the outside area and possibly weed. Left to our own devices we used our imagination and set to. Kate and Jane started picking up all the larger items casually strewn across the green, however there was treasure to be had! Silver spoons and plastic spades were our bounty which we passed to our team members to assist them with their weeding. I said we had to be imaginative, and in lieu of any adult tools, we had to make do. Ruth did a fabulous job in the baby garden, though the weeds were unfortunately a match for the plastic spade/spoon by the end of the session, it didn’t make it. Meanwhile Richard and Tanya were messing around in the mud kitchen, though not making mud pies for us to enjoy after the task, just a general tidy and weed where silver spoons were also going for the price of gold!

We managed to remove two tubs worth of weeds, and the general area looked a lot tidier, therefore I’d say mission accomplished