Tania Shakinovsky can sum up the worst job she’s ever done in one word: Oblivion.

It’s the biggest attraction at Alton Towers amusement park and the 27-year-old reporter from The Sentinel, Stoke-on-Trent, agreed, in a moment of madness, to ride it for charity.

The “hideous ride” begins with a 55-metre vertical drop.

“It’s not as bad as it sounds,” says Tania. “It’s worse. It’s like going into the bowels of hell.

“There’s a hole swirling with mist and, in my frozen terror, I mistook the mist for solid ground and then we went hurtling down towards it. It was really horrible.”

Tania joined the Mayor of Leek and darts ace Eric Bristow in the sponsored stunt, which raised about £4,000 for the Sentinel’s campaign to build a children’s hospice in Stoke.

The Donna Louise Trust – named after 16-year-old Donna Louise Hackney, a local girl who died of cystic fibrosis – had raised £40,000 in three years when it asked the Sentinel to take the project on as a campaign. Less than a year later, the fund stands at £2.2m.

The aim is to raise £5m to build, equip and meet first-year running costs of a hospice that would provide respite care for Staffordshire and South Cheshire children with life-limiting illnesses and their families.

Tania, who joined the Sentinel from college two years ago, has been the campaign reporter since the paper launched its appeal last June on pages 1, 2 and 3, including a feature on the Oswestry hospice on which the Stoke project would be modelled.

Bi-weekly stories on readers’ fund-raising efforts – from belly dancing to St Patrick’s Night events – have followed, along with front-page pieces on major developments, flagged up by a campaign logo and a thermometer showing the fund’s progress. Tania has kept the human face of the appeal alive by interviewing Donna Louise’s former teacher and the parents of dying children.

A 51-year-old grandfather hopes to have raised over £6,000 by running the 150-mile Sahara Desert Marathon. Readers have paid to be photographed with the FA Cup. Pigeon fanciers aim to raise £1,000 through a spring championship. Runners in this year’s Potteries Marathon are being urged to give sponsorship to the fund. Britannia Building Society has pledged 10p for each of its 300,000 members who vote at its AGM. Wedgwood has donated a piece of pottery signed by Sarah Ferguson as a raffle prize and a motor dealer has donated a car.

But the biggest boost came when a developer from Congleton responded to the Sentinel’s coverage by pledging to build the hospice free of charge – an offer worth £2m.

A further £800,000 is needed before work on the hospice can start, hopefully next spring.

Tania says fund-raising was slow in the early days but money is now flooding in and the appointment last week of a Trust fund-raiser is another major step.

“It’s seriously starting to snowball because we are getting about £10,000 in a week. People are really starting to take it to heart.”

She has no doubt that the goal will be achieved – and is equally insistent about the lengths to which she’ll go to help.

“I used to ride a lot of rollercoasters when I was young,” she says, “but Oblivion was truly terrifing and I would never do it again!”

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