The Fratton Together Lantern Parade brought the usual chaos, creativity and carnival vibes this year!

After attaching lights and sticks to the lanterns, we prepared ourselves for the tidal wave of local residents arriving to claim their makes for the parade. As usual, the best laid plans for lantern distribution went awry, but we were able to reunite most lanterns with their makers ahead of the parade.

We enjoyed the samba beats of batala as we paraded through Fratton. Dave found a creative way to get around his lantern not having a stick - check out the photos! Whilst carrying some larger lanterns, we were able to marshal the parade safely from start to finish. After enjoying our complimentary cups of tea, we did an extra bit of GoodGyming, carrying lanterns that were too big for cars and vans back to the Pantry.

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

Hopes dashed that the rain would hold off, I set about giving the rec a clear up.

Plenty of cans found. A used firework remnant! A hat, as there is always clothing! And spookiest of all (albeit slightly late for halloween), a bubblegum wrapper. Not scary on its own, however the 'are you afraid of the dark' podcast I was listening to had a discussion on bubblegum flavours at exactly the moment I spotted it.

Today we welcomed Elvis to his first session, give him a cheer! He got stuck into the big cut back and had razor sharp eyesight for spotting rubbish!

Dave was double good deeding, starting with us and the heading off to junior parkrun. Judy is also double deeding today with a run sandwiched in between. Top GoodGyming!

Favourite finds today were a rocking swan 🦢, corkscrew and mini football ⚽

Good work by all!

Sadly, due to sickness it ended up being a solo adventure.

But I was able to test out the new Brooks Ghost Trails, which made me happy as I've worn Ghosts for my road running for many a year now.

Meon is a very enjoyable out and back course with a lot of mud! Brooks had brought the white version of the shoe, they may rethink that for their next showcase!

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!