Turning by rote
3 GoodGymers made their way to help an isolated older person in Southwark.
- Saturday, 1st of June 2019
Here's what Mrs Y of SE19 had to say about the mission:
From the team who referred this task to GoodGym: "Your organisation and runners are doing an amazing job offering support to those who usually do not have anyone else to support them. I just wanted to say a big Thank You! "
This afternoon saw me meet up with Dom and Frances for a mission for Mrs Y in Southwark. Both Dom and Frances had participated in the GoodGym Southwark takeover of Dulwich parkrun earlier, which seemed very energetic! (For comparison, my main expenditure of energy today was in trying to contain my excitement when a man on the tube made his dog wave a paw at me. #winning)
Mrs Y will shortly be coming home from a care home. Before that can happen, space needs to be made for a hospital bed to be installed. We were asked to remove a sofa from the living room to help effect this.
We were welcomed into Mrs Y's home by her son, Junior, who showed us the sofa to be moved. He also expressed a hope that we would also be able to remove another sofa from the living room, but feared it might be too long.
We started with the smaller sofa, both to ease ourselves into the task and to give us some practical experience of the spaces/angles involved. Dom and Frances mostly tackled that while I took a couple of photos whenever it looked like the sofa was in an awkward position (pretty much whenever it had inadvertently turned into a corner sofa). All three of us have done this standard turning/pivoting of a sofa so frequently that we could probably do it in our sleep (rote learning is awesome!) 👍
Easy sofa moved, we contemplated the longer one. This longer sofa was a behemoth: definitely too long to angle around some of the tight corners on the landing, we briefly entertained the idea of chucking it out the window before deciding to avoid the potential law suit from the car owner next door or the foreseeable crack in the pavement below 🙈
Decisions/space made, we chatted with Junior for a few minutes about Mrs Y and GoodGym, before making our goodbyes. (Junior made the rather poetic statement that hearing about GoodGym was like finding Perrier in the desert when you're parched, which made Dom feel special.)
Lovely working with you both; I'm sure I'll see you guys on another mission relatively soon! 😄
Report written by Elizabeth
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This was a great one (that, yes, made me feel special!). Also glad that we agreed not to defenestrate the 3 seater for the reasons mentioned, Liz!
It *was* fun, and interesting to chat to Junior for a bit 😄
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