We had our first session out for our new collaboration with Home-Start this evening, getting ready to jazz up the Family Hub gardens across the city.

Our primary task this evening was prepping the external fences for a paint job, which involved not only sanding down the wood, but removing a delightful layer of moss as well! Jane, Dave and Katie made some new friends that they discovered in the wood grain - check out Bert and Ernie in the pictures!

Judy and Jen were Team Table, sanding down and sprucing up the kids' picnic benches with a pallet of blue paints.

We also used the forces of nature to aid out prep and clean up, with a found stick becoming a marvellous paint stirrer and some soggy leaves to mop up splodges of paint from the concrete!

It was the night of the Elizabeth Foundation Halloween party, many children had come along in an excellent array of fancy dress.

We arrived (as requested) at 530 thinking we were setting up the party but instead we were asked to judge the fancy dress competition (how do you decide who's "best dressed"?) and help clear away and move tables and chairs back to their usual spots.

As we'd expected to be needed longer, we decided to do a quick litter pick around Palmerston Road (thanks to Ellie who had the GG Southampton litter pickers in her car). In keeping with the Halloween theme, we even found a ghostly looking bin bag and a plastic spider 🕷️ as well as a little ghost 👻 on the Debenhams hoarding.

Once completed, we met up with Abby and had an impromptu social. Note for the future: bang bang cauliflower noodles and beetroot & feta flatbread look like tasty menu choices if you're ever in a "Lounge" venue.

Thanks everyone for your task flexibility! And happy Halloween one week early! 🎃🧹🧙

After a thwarted attempt last week, six GoodGymers made their way through the mean streets of Portsmouth to take down flyers for Portsmouth City Council.

The Council have started using reusable cable ties for posters in the city, so to keep things GoodGym and Green, we used our session to remove them and return them to stop them being mistaken for single use plastic.

As the evening was very muggy, we enjoyed a stroll with a cheeky drink stop halfway. The barkeep who served us was fascinated by the GG shirts, so we gave her a pitch and hopefully we'll see her at a session soon!

We also enjoyed some exercise on GoodGym Portsmouth's very own Angela Chick's pavement mural in the city centre, and tried out the PLAYCE exercise space in Landport on our travels.

Judy's various attempts to say "cable ties" has certainly been one of my highlights this evening... "table pies" being my very favourite.

We have made a start on taking the Somersfest posters down around Central Portsmouth.

PCC provides reusable cable ties, so we have been collecting these back in to reduce plastic waste.

Dave and Jen headed back down to Somerstown to help with the big close-down.

After helping collapse the gazebo and load the car for Jen's work colleagues, we went back to where it all started - putting back all the chairs and tables we put out way back at 9am!

We then thought we were just about done... until we were asked to help with yet more chairs! There was an Outdoor Cinema that we somehow missed earlier, so we brought all of the orange chairs back home too!

By the time we got home we were so excited to see chairs we could actually sit on!! What a day!

After Jen finished topping up her run to a round number, we were put to work setting up the resident survey area at Somersfest. Attendees will be offered a free icecream, soft drink or tote bag for filling in surveys about the Somerstown Community Garden and the local Housing Offices, so they were expecting it to be busy!

We definitely got our GoodGym workout moving chairs from the Gibson Centre to the Community Garden - made much easier when we found two trolleys to push them through the streets of Somerstown! Jane was definitely our champion trolley dolly, with zero falls off kerbs or crashing in to anything. Dave didn't need a trolley and huffed the chairs himself - a self-declared "strong, independent woman".

We then helped Matt from the PCC garden team with putting up gazebos - a venture that resulted in Jen gaining a new pet slug. A mini rescue mission occurred to re-home the little fella out of the line of sight of local birds.

Before heading off, we helped some of the local charities to transport their stalls from where they could park to their pitch, and helped with yet more gazebos! One particularly challenging gazebo led to a slightly inappropriate photo of Jen and Dave - check out the pictures!

A very productive and sweaty morning, and Jen's work friends were extremely grateful for our help!