It was a chilly night for a litter pick, with winter starting to make itself felt, but we turned out in force at Rose Hill Community Centre.

Our litter picks in the area around the Community Centre and the estates surrounding The Oval are always highly appreciated by the staff at the community centre and the local Low Carbon group - we were even joined by a member of Rose Hill and Iffley Low Carbon group last night.

With quite a large area to cover we find it's best to split into smaller groups to tackle different streets - divide and conquer! We set ourselves an hour limit so that no one got completely chilled to the bone and scattered across Rose Hill, litter pickers and yellow rubbish sacks in hand. We got heckled by a local who appeared to think that we were the Council and should clean up the area more often (the big 'Community Litter Pick' stamp on our bin bags not seeming to give them the clue that we were volunteers), found masks, cigarette butts, hedges full of cans, and all the other usual suspects. Aladdin put us in a cheery mood when we got back to the community centre with his gold sequin shirt, very Pro photo taking, and appreciation for the clean-up job we'd undertaken.

Our litter picking conversations included possible updates for the GoodGym litter bingo cards (newspapers are out, wet wipes are in), whether squirrels really get addicted to nicotine from littered cigarette butts, and favourite festive treats. Clearly we need to be supplying panettone, cheese and biscuits, and mince pies at our Christmas 'do'!