Mint Sauce lockdown fundraiser makes more than £8,000 for Cancer Research

A one-off collection of Mint Sauce cartoons featuring Jo Burt’s much-loved mountain biking sheep has raised more than £8,000 for charity, far exceeding the artist’s expectations for the project which he has been undertaking during lockdown.

As we reported last week, Jo, who has blogged regularly for road.cc since the very earliest days of the site, published the cartoons on Instagram as The Mint Sauce Lockdown Project and collected the more than 100 images in a tiny sketchbook.

> One-off Mint Sauce cartoon collection being raffled for Cancer Research

He had planned to auction the unique body of work but instead decided to raffle it, with anyone pledging £5 on JustGiving receiving one entry, while £10 got two entries, and so on – and says the response has been “mind-blowing.”

Jo told us: “The JustGiving raffle is all done now, and the Lockdown Project booklet raised a frankly outstanding £8,286 for Cancer Research UK.

“We were thinking that a total of £1.5K would have been great, £2K wonderful and £2.5K would have been the absolute gobsmacking best so this total has been pretty mind-blowing, and a little bit emotional to be honest.

“Donations ranged from people buying a single raffle ticket of £5 to those of £100 and more, the response and generosity of everyone has been a chink of blue sky in these grey and miserable times.

“The lucky winner was Ben Green who is absolutely chuffed but also humble enough to declare that he's just looking after the booklet for a while.

“Aside from raising a while f*ckbunch of money for Cancer Research UK the project has been fun to do, a daily exercise and a distraction from all the everything for me, I shall miss it a little bit,” Jo added.

“Actually, it's been bloody amazing, thank you everybody. Hugs when we're allowed.”