In a galaxy far, far away … there’s a cookie monster

FANS of Star Wars flocking to see the latest film Rogue One at Oban’s Phoenix Cinema on Monday may have been surprised to spot the cookie monster rather than Darth Vader.

The blue, googly- eyed, voracious biscuit- eating puppet from the US children’s TV series Sesame Street, famous for the phrase ‘me want cookie’, made a guest appearance in Oban’s cinema to watch the eighth instalment in the epic space saga – and The Oban Times can exclusively reveal the cookie monster ate a packet of Revels.

However, the cookie monster in question was actually Lee McKillop, a janitor at Kilninver Primary School, who was dressed in her fuzzy onesie to raise money for the Sophie North Charitable Trust.

‘This is a charity that is close to my heart,’ writes Lee on her fundraising page ‘My Onesie Night Out’, on mydonate. bt.com. ‘I have a friend who lost his daughter in the Dunblane shootings in 1996. This charity was set up in her memory and I’m aiming to raise £100.’

Lee has already smashed her target, making £ 326 by Thursday last week.

This year was the 20th anniversary of the Dunblane massacre, when 16 children, including five-year- old Sophie North, and their teacher were killed by Thomas Hamilton in a mass shooting.

To honour Sophie’s memory, her father, Dr Mick North, set up a charity in 2004. It makes three donations each year, on the anniversary of the tragedy in March, on Sophie’s birthday in October, and in April, in memory of Sophie’s mum, who died of breast cancer in 1993.

By the end of last year, the trust had made 25 donations totalling £6,156 to charities related to children’s diseases and hospices, breast cancer, care of the terminally ill, and conflict resolution and anger reduction.

Ms McKillop, a friend of Mick, said: ‘The things he has been through – it is just amazing. He was one of the main forces against handguns.’

Earlier this year Dr North said children in Britain are safer as a result of a successful campaign to ban handguns a year after the tragedy.

Lee added: ‘I work in a wee primary school myself and it could have been any of us. I tried to think of what I could do. I tried to think of something Sophie would have liked.’

So she picked her cookie monster onesie out the bedroom drawer and decided to wear it to the cinema, because ‘it would be busier, just to add to the embarrassment’.