Seven goodgymers met with two volunteers from Stoke Park active to litter pick Upton Court Park around the car park and scout hut. The area was cleaned up in no time with so many helpers, some new and some more experienced. A few wet feet after a misty and soggy start but it soon brightened up as we walked to Eton.

Everybody enjoyed being outdoors in nature, though perhaps not the slippery mud!

A particularly special day today as we had our last session with Manjit as the area activator for Slough. Thank you Manjit for everything you have done with GG in the Slough community in the past 6 years.

A quick coffee and cake was grabbed in Eton before returning to Slough - - a good 6k return walk.

This morning Nisha and I did the Earthwatch water sample test at the Langley end of the Slough Canal.

It was a very quick and easy test of the levels of nitrate and phosphate in the water. Both looked to be on the low level

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 morning I did a litter pick with Harsha and Manjit around our kids school. We collected 2 bags of rubbish

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!

This morning Nisha, Pam and I spent an hour helping Slough Outreach with donated Asian wear fashion items! commonly referred to as 'suits'...

When Shin told me about the task I knew I had the right person signed up! What doesn't Nisha know about Asian fashion??? She's our glam Bollywood Queen!

So the task was to sort through all the donated lenga's; salwar kameez; dress suits; suits; sari's and general party sharty items into 3 piles...

• Hang with pride and sell for a fiver;

• Bargain bucket good to go but missing an item for 3 quid;

• Long lost love not worth keeping so lets give to rag.

In our best 'market trader' accents we got to work...

Classy is not what you wear... It's how you carry yourself

Some of the donated items were of immaculate condition and a real bargain at a fiver... we hope some lucky locals pick these items up!

Within one hour we had sifted through 2 big boxes of clothes and labelled them accordingly!

So from drab to fab we did our job!