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 fab to welcome Leszek to his first task in Portsmouth this evening - thanks for coming to visit!

The evening started with adding lights and sticks to the lanterns that people had made at various community events over the past few weeks. The next task was reuniting lanterns with their owners ahead of the parade.

Marshalling this year was a bit of an easier as the partial road closure magically expanded in to a full road closure.

Sinéad entertained the crowds with her light up poi (apologies for the spelling, Sinead!) whilst the rest of us carried the "special" lanterns that had been donated.

After spending a bit of time stripping lanterns of their lights and sticks ready to be reused again next year, we all headed off for some much needed down-time.

Our small but mighty team this evening smashed out our delivery task in impressive time!

Jen and Dave have clearly been to the Judy Knapp School of Flyering - after their tuition from the master herself a couple of weeks ago.

Newest Task Force member Yvonne also got a masterclass in listing tasks whilst joining forces with Katie.