The weather outside wasn't so frightful, and our painting skills were delightful.

Instead of spreading comfort and joy, we were spreading Creocate, and a lovely job we did too.

We had a pleasant evening reflecting on 2024 and thinking forward to 2025, and what looks to be a very exciting January Challenge!

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, and see you in the new year!

After some last minute cancellation chaos (and Dave's post-work dash to B&Q, we met up at Buckland Family Hub for possibly one of our most unusual tasks to date.

Our job was to to wood treat the large wooden pirate ship in the Hub garden. It was quite a daunting task, but despite a number of late drop-outs, the hard-core team completed nearly the whole ship!

By the end of the hour we were potentially a little giddy on Creocate fumes, but had certainly got an old ship looking ship-shape!

There was plenty of chat about upcoming tasks, brush-based innuendo and a tale of a turkey-driven rugby tackle in M&S.

Thanks to the super team that came along this evening, youre all amazing!

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.