A hardy bunch of GG Yorkies assembled to help out the annual Brass Monkey half marathon race once again. Various roles were covered including marshalling and manning the water stations. One not so hardy GG-er (me) was nice and dry as I was on baggage duty for the first time and it was great fun! There were several GG folk running and lots of familiar faces from other local running clubs. Well done to everyone for doing a great job out in the rain this morning - your support was very much appreciated by all the runners.

On a very cold, and quite damp evening 11 super keen Yorkies turned out to brighten up the area around the Acorn rugby club, which often gets quite littery.

We split into two groups to head clockwise and anti-clockwise round the block. Time flies when you're picking up endless plastic bottles and sweetie wrappers, and it was soon time to head back to base, with a bag each filled up. It certainly wasn't hard to complete our "pick up 100 pieces of litter" January bingo square! Best find goes to Michael for the numberplate.

A quick photo and it was time to head home/go for a freezing cold run, according to preference.

As in previous years, we joined Rotary York Ainsty's Santa sleigh to provide some elves to go door-to-door collecting donations for York Mind. We were lucky that the temperature was a balmy 11 degrees this evening - much better than previous years' rain and very cold temperatures. The sleigh made its way through the streets of Woodthorpe, stopping regularly so that Santa (aka GG-er James) could have a chat and give out sweets to some of the local children. Lots of people had their cash ready for us and one chap gave us a small bag full of coins that he had collected. A lack of cash was not a barrier as, for the first time, one of our elves (Nick) had the York Mind card reader app on his phone so he could take card payments without people needing to go to the card reader with the sleigh. It was great fun to shout "Nick" and see him come running! We had a pleasant 2½ hours of collecting before returning to our start point, tired but feeling more in the Christmas spirit. We will find out later exactly how much we have collected - can we beat last year's total?