Pass the Poo-cel

11 GG Yorkies met on a dreary winter's morning to help clean up the Orbital cycle route.

Leanne had arranged to pick up the litter picking equipment from parkrun, where she met Paul Kelly, Ben, Pete, Vicky and Huw. It seemed that Vicky was the only one who had actually looked at how far away the task was from parkrun and wisely decided to cycle, while the rest of us grabbed a couple of litter pickers each and made a mad dash, 2.3 miles across town to our meeting point. We arrived at 10.01am. The others didn't seem to mind our slight tardiness!

Huw, who carried four of the litter pickers from parkrun declared that he wasn't staying for the task - he'd just come along for the run and to lend a hand with taking the equipment to the start point. He also insisted that it shouldn't be counted as a good deed for him, since he wasn't actually doing any litter picking. A fitting reminder in the midst of the January challenge that we don't just do good things to score points - we also do things because we're nice people who like to help - Thanks Huw!

Ben immediately got stuck in and pulled a hubcap out of a hedge. Not to be beaten, Mitch followed up by pulling a ladies high heeled shoe out of the very same hedge. We quickly spread out along a section of the path.

Leanne, who has been watching a lot of crime dramas lately climbed up onto the bank and shouted:

I've found a burner phone!

Throughout the task others shouted out their weird and wonderful finds -

• A shopping basket!
• A Middlesborough jacket!
• An unopened bottle of cider!
• Another shopping basket!
• A hat!
• A fire extinguisher!
• A snake! (bit of cable)

Others weren't so lucky - and Ben's team seemed just to find a lot of full dog poo bags which they passed between them to get into the rubbish bag.

Passers by were generally cheery, thanking us for our help and interested to find out why we were out picking litter that morning.

You're doing a rubbish job!

joked one member of the public.

Soon, our first bags were filling up and we needed to find a place to drop them off. We were using green volunteer collection bags which the council provide so that they know that we're not just fly tipping. Our instructions were to leave them near a public bin and they would be collected when the bins are emptied... the problem was that there didn't seem to be many bins around. While Leanne ran to the far end of our section of the path and found the nearest public bin, Pete sweet-talked the lady at Morrisons into letting us put some of them out with their bins.

An hour later, we'd deposited about 12 bags of litter (or maybe more) for collection, and all wandered off our separate ways to find breakfast/ lunch.