Warm and sunny this morning so we were sparing a thought for all those taking part in the London Marathon today, although Maria had managed to put in a great 5 mile round trip and Richard had run over the hill to reach today's mission - nice work both.

Unable to get a response from our host, we were luckily pointed in the right direction by her helpful neighbour, and found the lovely Mrs M and the equally lovely Mrs L in the communal garden space for the flats with an array of tools, bags and gloves for us to use.

Amongst these stood a gleaming new fork, purchased specially for today's mission as the previous one had seen better days and finally bitten the dust during last week's mission (best not to dwell on that!) and Mrs M was very keen that the new model should remain intact by the time we left - no pressure then!

Our task today was to continue the good work started last week and get rid of the weeds, brambles and small tree stumps along one side of the garden, whilst also clearing the borders alongside a path of weeds.

Richard got straight into sorting out the latter, Maria took to weeding the beds in the garden before joining Richard along the path, whilst I put myself on bramble and tree stump duty with the new shiny tool! Any breakage was going to be down to me.

Whilst relatively cheap, said instrument was remarkably strong dealing comfortably with the more deep rooted stuff, the task made easier by the soft ground.

Refreshed by most welcome tea and choccie biccies we dug, pulled and cleared for a couple of hours with Mrs L helping to reduce and bag up the waste.

Having bagged and binned a good half dozen sacks of waste, we said our goodbyes and went on our merry separate ways, wishing Maria a lovely upcoming holiday in the Baltics.

Oh and the new fork lived happily ever after!

Nice work all!