Did you see the sky tonight? And the beautiful full moon? Experts say its another Northern Lights experience tonight and I think they might be right!

Tonights task was to deliver leaflets for the Food Cycle group who are offering hot meals every Monday lunchtime at the Salvation Army on Stoke Rd. Our task owner Natalie asked if we could highlight the service to locals living nearby.

So that's exactly what we did.

It was so lovely to meet Merlyn on her first ever task with us. And what a lovely gentle first task it was. We met at the Salt Hill Activity Centre at 6:30 and by 6:45 we headed off on a nice gentle walk to Stoke Rd where we met Devajani.

Soon we divided off into smaller groups and started working our way around Grays Rd, Littledown Rd, Belgrave Rd, delivering all the leaflets we had.

Within 45 minutes we had delivered them all.

Thank you all for getting involved in this task.

We had to change the task this evening from a group run to a community mission as the allotments have no lighting and with it getting darker earlier (what's up with that!!!!! So not ready for the darker nights)... we needed the extra day time hours to do the task safely...

So we all made our own way to Cherry Orchard Allotments and got to work on plot 5 bed 4. Thankfully the soil was soft this time (last month is was rock hard!).

It was great to see the progress the task owner Home Start Slough have made on the plots..

We spent an hour chatting, digging, pulling the weeds and just catching up on life.

As the light faded we stopped and got ready to leave.

Next week we have a new task owner (Food Cycle Slough) who would like their new food service promotion so we will be delivering their flyers for them around Salt hill and Baylis area.

Nice to have a few goodgymers out on a bank holiday Monday for a bit of doing good and getting fit.

It all started as a nice evening task. Our run part today was actually a strength based fitness session which we did at the end of our session.

The park itself was pretty eventuful this evening. The play areas were full of children enjoying themselves, the main park was full of people playing football and cricket, the families were out having picnics and then there was us... litter picking up behind everyone.

Tonights hoard found us a ready salted crisp packet with a use by date of 2019! It was hidden away in the deep dark depths of the bushes.

Cutting hedge technology?

Speaking of bushes... Abdul found a kitchen knife in the ones adjacent to Bath Rd. Luckily no signs of blood! We reported it to the police but were told to just dispose of it!

So we did our best to cover up the sharp end with cardboard then double wrap it in bags before 'safely' disposing of it.

As we continued our litter pick we found a gun!!!!

But don't worry... the only thing shooting out of this one was water...

We disposed of that safely too! Some serious trouble shooting going on tonight!

On a lighter note, there was a lovely wedding ceremony taking place on the green outside the Karahi restaurant.

Cant resist a good slam

After collecting 5 bags of rubbish we ended the session with some resistance band exercises followed by kettlebell and slam ball sets.

Thank you to everyone for coming along this evening.

Next Monday we will be helping Raggy Rd Allotments. Hope to see you there.

OG's to Newbies and everyone else in between

It's our 6th birthday ... I don't feel 6 years older than when I first started doing GoodGym! Maybe it's the GG vibe that keeps us young?!! But what keeps us young is all the love we get from being in this group. And OMG I am blown away that sooooo many of you came this evening to help celebrate our 6th birthday! I really was only expecting the 10 that signed up to be there so when I saw another 10 mysteriously appear behind the church doors...it was like a devine intervention! Thank you to you all for making the effort to come along tonight.

Five going on Six

This past year we have as always achieved so much. We won an award at the Slough CSV #OneSlough Awards for our Innovative Ways for helping the community. We celebrated Jean's 90th birthday. We've had new task owners like Global Education Trust and Raggy Rd Allotments as well as our usuals. We've formed new friendships. We've had new members from the refugee community join us and sadly we've lost a few too. We battled the Bibby (and won!). Ricky finally got his 100th!. Jen hit 450 plus!; Ruth served her century (tonight); Sut soared to 400; Pam ploughed to over 370 and Sara smashed out over 260, Sandy succeeded with nearly 230 and Helen hacked out 77 heading towards her 100th! We karaoked at Christmas; have been frequent flyers and litter heroes and had allot of fun digging around. We've networked and insta-lly promoted GG as soon as the task has been done. We Beat-the Boat but still have The Big Half, Berlin and Vitality to smash!

There is always so much going on in the small yet compacted town that is Slough. And we've collected over 100 bags of rubbish around Slough since our last birthday!

We started the evening doing our usual. Meeting up Upton Court Park and making our way down to our task location of St Mary's Church (with the little surprise at the Church). Our task was to do a bit inside and a bit outside. Inside we had Sandy, Abdul, Roisin, Ruth and Pam sweeping, dusting and wiping whilst everyone else were outside either litter picking or cutting back overgrowth. With our usual grace we got through the tasks fairly swiftly, leaving enough time for cake....

But as with any special event we did have a twist.

Goodlympics

I don't know about you but I love the Olympics and watch as many events as I can. So whilst I was watching the ladies Rugby last night I came up with the idea of doing our very own Olympic events. Luckily I have 3 very eager helpers in my household who designed some of the games, drew out the signs and even made us an Olympic flame

It's never good to be too prepared

At home, I had prepped a sheet of paper outlining each person signed up (the good ones who signed up!) with a partner and a little Olympic style game. But when you get 10 others turn up (the bad ones for not signing up..but oh so good to see them!), I had to throw my paper away and improvise..

So in the end we had:

• Runners Beans We had Sara, Pam, Gauri and Meera on bean bags races. Pam showed so much grace as she eloquently balanced the bean bag on her head whilst walking round the war memorial without it falling off her head even once! Gold standard right there;

• N'Sync were Jenny ,Sandy, Ruth and Roisin on a synchronized swim routine. And wow how good were they! They could (just maybe) give Tom and Noah a few tips??;

• The Happy Hoppers were Harsha,Keira ,Chrissy, Agnija, Jen and Devajani. They gave us an entertaining minute of their show jumping skills using litter pickers! What style; what class!;

• Bean Poles were Abdulaziz, Peter, Ricky and Jean on bean bag throws. Ricky took an early lead closely followed by Abdul, but Jean stole the show with her sideways throw!

Each team displayed excellent execution, flare and skill. Team GB doesn't know it's missing some key players from Slough over in Paris

Flaming 'ell

We ended the night with the Goodlympic flame being passed from member to member as it makes it's way (slowy...might take it 4 years) to LA. Great solo efforts by all!

Ruth's 100th

Huge well done to Ruth on achieving her 100th Good Deed tonight! Ruth has been a founder member and supporter of ours since we started and we love having her along whenever she is free. Well done Ruth.

And then there was cake! Thank you to Helen for baking such delicious cup cakes and to everyone for being such good sports in all my mad games.

Thank you all so much for making another birthday event an enjoyable one.

This evening we were at Salthill park doing a litter pick task. It never fails to amaze us on how much litter this one park alone generates! Even though we collected 4 bags on Sunday there was still so much to do tonight.

Whilst we waited for everyone to get to the meet up point outside the activity centre, we started on the car park with our named session.

Whats my name!

So the task was to see if we could find litter that spelt out our names..

Agnija found actimel; gum and nails

Jen - using her full name found - Juice; exciting things; novelty toy; napkins; ice lolly; Fanta; exotic things; ribena

Pam aka Parmjit found Plenty of plastic, rubber balloons; ice cream wrapper, juice cartons

Peter found Paper, plates, playing cards, tickets, rappers (lots of pees; no e's and a phonetic way for spelling wrapper!)

I found a mayo wrapper and a napkin!

But the overall winner was Jean who managed to spell out her first name and surname!

Juice; Egg shell in egg cup, Air freshener packet, Napkins

Water; Apple core , Tissues; Toys; Spoon

Well done Jean!

All these items filled 6 bags! and we only covered the car park and play area.

Next week is our 6th birthday which means there will be cake. Please do come along

It's July! yet we battled with a heavy heavy downpour this evening just as Jean and I were driving to our meet up point.

We were discussing if we were going to walk or run the 1.5km to the task when suddenly out of nowhere the sky turned grey and it started pletting it down!

With messages rolling in from the rest of the team who had signed up asking if we were aborting!

Abort abort abort!

We turned to plan B which was for Jean and I to drive to the allotments and wait for a break in the weather and hopefully get a bit of the task done...

Plan C it is

With no break in the weather... we resulted in having a lovely chatty catchup before calling it a day! Plan D is to reschedule for another day!

This evening we were helping Jillian at The Global Trust Bookstore to sort through the piles of donated books.

Before setting off from Salt Hill Park we welcomed Urmila on her first GoodGym session - a very warm welcome!

With Pam, Keith and Urmila walking the 1 mile distance, they set off whilst Jean and I carried on with the warm up.

Soon we had set off too. Jean was on fire tonight! I told her to set the pace and run at her pace then walk whenever she wanted to... we ran nearly all the way! Great to have running Jean back

Not all books are created sequel

Our tasks were to just sort out the books. But the books were everywhere so we were bound to get a little confused.

I helped to work out the sub tasks with task owner Jillian and we set Jean and Keith the naughty corner to sort out the fact from the fictions!

They did a remarkable job clearing out the corner into some kind of order!

Once upon a time

Kam and Pam had the job of sorting out the kiddies corner. Kam was on all the reference books whilst Pam had the pre schoolers!

Urmila and I came down to help after an aborted clothes sorting task!

We soon had crates of books in the correct piles

Great job all round everyone!

What a hot day! I think it put a fair few off from coming tonight as we only had Jean and I attend...

But that didn't mean a thing as we got loads done! We had a lovely walk before the task then did a few stretches before heading over to the Ujala Foundation for a garden weeding task.

The back garden was looking a little weedy so Jean and I did what we could to pull them out, sweep up the area and generally make it look better.

I think we succeeded!

Next week we will be helping Raggy Rd Allotments. Meeting at Salt Hill Park at 18:30.

This evening we were heading out to Wexham Park Hospital for our regular litter pick. We met at Shaggy Calf Lane at 18:30 and waited for the team to arrive then headed out.

We decided to walk up tonight which was lovely as we all had great litter chats as we made our way.

On arrival we met Claire who was back for her second task with us.

Our focus was all the hidden litter gems around the hospital and the parking lot where we found the usual items of food containers; cans; face masks plus almost a full outfit! - except we only found one shoe.

Forty-Five minutes in and we had collected 5 bags of rubbish! Great job by everyone!

Once a-pun a time....

Some of you may know this already but this is the school that my children attend and the task came about after the school put a shout out for parents to come help tidy it up one Sunday afternoon. A few parents came along that day but there were still plenty of tasks that needed doing hence our visit tonight. The Langley Academy Primary also connects a fair few of the GoodGym team as Nisha, Sut and Harsha also are GG members and TLAP parents.

Our primary role tonight was to tidy up planter bed by removing the grass, putting down the membrane (having a little snooze in the bed!); putting down some soil but removing the grass first (easier said than done) and finishing off with compost. Well I'd say we achieved a SAT score of above baseline on this one! We did manage to put down the membrane but ran out of staples in the gun; we did manage to empty the soil bags but there were a fair few chunks of grass in them which couldn't be used; so that resulted in the top compost having to be delayed - Sorry Miss..we did try!

Newly grown..

Nahush was on his first task with us and he did an amazing job - getting absolutely stuck into the task

Hair today...gone tomorrow

Not many GG'ers go get their hair and nails done before a GG task - but Nisha did...lucky we had a spare pair of gardening gloves to protect those perfect nails!

Channeling her inner thoughts

Sutyee did a great job of creating a channel for bulbs to be planted. She did it so quickly it was almost like she had a team of little people helping!

Gnome-body knows gardening like...

Jean and Pam - always grateful for their gardening insights and advice

Well done to everyone tonight for their hard efforts

We look forward to having a team social to celebrate a little birthday on Saturday!