Clearing the way

When the site warden announced “The job this morning is rubbish!” she was perhaps not expecting volunteers to reply “Good!”

The volunteers being Green-Gymmers, however, that was exactly the response she got.  Ruthlessly clearing the work area of accumulated ‘bits which might come in handy one day, you never know’ – and transporting them to a heap from where they can be taken to landfill/recycling – proved to be an unconventional Green-Gym task which Green-Gymmers nevertheless flung themselves into with characteristic gusto:

Volunteer 1: “Would it be easier just to pick up the shed?”

Volunteer 2: “That looks useful!”
Volunteer 3: “By the time the day comes when that is useful,
you’d never be able to find it again underneath all this lot – throw it out!”

Site warden: “I feel a huge sense of relief”

As if to illustrate the point of the exercise, one of the tasks originally scheduled for today had been trailed as “path marking (special invented system)”.  That, however, required the 6”-nails, which were known to be in stock somewhere in the storage area, but could anyone find them when they were needed?  No!

For a while, then, we were left wondering what the ‘special invented system’ might be.  To me it sounded like something out of a fairy tale – marking a trail with small white stones, or leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, anyone?  (Not that I was much impressed by the story of Hänsel and Gretel when I was young.  Marking a route with breadcrumbs was never going to work!  Anyway, why did the children need to mark a path, which in most illustrated versions of the tale was so obvious in the first place?)

As the rubbish-clearers/archaeologists worked on, however, the bag of nails was re-located.  C was therefore inducted into the secret of the new woodland-route-marking system, which apparently was inspired by the 2012 Olympics mountain-bike course.  This was the prototype path-line roundel:

In the meantime, there were also some more conventional Green-Gym activities, namely trimming back vegetation from paths across the site …

and consumption of goodies, which I am told were distinctly moreish/Moorish:

(It turned that our colleague had not been in the Caribbean at all, but in the other Granada!)

After tea, a production and installation process was set up.  This was the craft table:

Here, the first line of roundels Mk 1 going in – Mk 2 is in the development phase:

“The R & D Department is on to it”

By session end, the work area had been transformed.  Here, for instance, the side of the shed is not only visible, but has been dug out with re-laid drainage system, plus cover to prevent any inquisitive small person coming to grief: