We ventured out of the city this evening, with a slightly shifty-looking rendezvous in Sainsbury's car park. Walking and running groups made their way uphill to St Andrew's Church, where we met up with Chris, the church's volunteer gardener.

An impressive array of tools made their way from Chris' car to the compost area, where we set to work loading the contents of a make-shift compost heap into bags. This will allow Chris to build a functioning container for the compost, keeping things much tidier.

In her enthusiam, Judy somehow managed to upturn a whole shovel-full of compost over Ness, who in turn nearly took David's head off with a pitchfork. I wonder if I might need to work on my risk assessments! Wilson unearthed a 10ft python* whilst digging, which Ness kindly and carefully moved to a safe new home.

We certainly worked up an appetite, but luckily Val provided some tasty brownie bites to fuel our run back.

*it was a slow worm

We welcomed Veronika to her first Group Run this evening - thank you for joining us! Luckily she didn't have too many names to learn, as we had Double Dave and Double Katie tonight!

Thanks to Katie for finding us a last minute task for us - weeding by head-torch wasn't the easiest task, but from the before and after photos you can see we made a big impact!

Our team was small but mighty this evening, joined by the legendary Barb for a night of brass polishing.

We'd made great inroads with the cleaning last week, but with the aid of toothbrushes and the creatively named "Pink Stuff" even in the most intricate portions of the brass knuckles came up a treat I even polished so hard I made a hole in my rubber gloves!

Finishing off with a Brasso rub-down, we got the task finished just as the clock struck 7.30pm - timed to perfection.