There was me thinking I'd got a great story this week but I should have guessed that by the time Skegness got its pants on the story had already been half way around the world and back.
I have a really good contact with a local depression group and so when the organiser told me he'd been sent two "patients" from a German soft toy maker's Asylum Range, I thought it was a cracker that I'd send to my favourite contact at the Sun.
I asked her to hold it until my paper had published and she responded by telling me it had already been in the nationals all last week. Bugger! Did I feel daft.
I can't find a link to any of these stories on google so I'll use my own here because it is still a great yarn.
Soft toys with a mental illness have been donated to a Skegness group by a German toymaker who believes his "patients" can help those suffering from depression and disorders.
A hippo with obsessive compulsive disorder and a turtle with depression are part of the Paraplush firm’s Asylum range and they have been donated to the Depression Support Group Lincolnshire based in Skegness.
Paraplusch makes toys with a variety of mental health issues. The hippo can’t help but try to constantly solve a jigsaw puzzle with little or no attention to the outside world and the turtle looks very glum.
Martin Kittsteiner is the creator of the toys. He said the idea came to him after making a joke about it with his girlfriend. He says that both children and grown-ups are attracted to the vulnerability of the toys, and that adults especially see it as therapeutic for themselves.
He sent two toys to Skegness after support group organiser James Hardaker wrote to him after a group forum user brought the story to everyone’s attention - and now two of these unique toys will be used to raise funds for the group.
"These are about £25 each to buy, so we’re really grateful to Martin for the kind donation. Personally I think the toys are great, and I’d love to see more entrepreneurs taking such an active interest in mental health."
Other "patients" in the range include a psychedelic snake called Sly who has issues with inner conflict which can be interpreted as a sign of an ambivalent relationships towards his own body, Dolly who seems to temporarily suffer from the delusion that she is a wolf despite the fact that she is without a doubt a sheep, and Kroco a crocodile whose hypersensitive hallucinatory perception is a symptom of a paranoid psychosis.
For more information about Paraplusch go to http://www.parapluesch.de/ and for the Depression Support Lincolnshire group check out http://www.depressionlincolnshire.co.uk/index.htm
Such constant bad luck with news stories and features is one of the reasons why I want to change from being a news and feature writer to a script and fiction writer. At least those stories I make up from my own imagination are original and less likely to have been done before.
Maybe the mentally ill and obsessive anti-smokers should check them out but then the toymaker says these soft animals have souls and that's is why the mentally ill relate to them. Antis have no souls and no hearts so I guess these little cute toys wouldn't do their mental obsessions any good.