A local mental health charity is sending Good Vibes – in the form of a traffic cone – thousands of miles to America.

An awareness raising opportunity at this year’s Party at the Palace music festival in Linlithgow turned into something of an international affair for Bo’ness based charity Good Vibes Meditation Mental Health and Wellbeing Trust.

The trust, founded by Susan Gilbert, supports children, teenagers and adults through a range of mental health and wellbeing services.

However, after the weekend’s music festival, news of the work of Good Vibes will be spreading much further afield – to Boston, Massachusetts.

Susan and Kirsty with the Stuart Highlanders New England Pipe Band and of course, the signed traffic cone.

placeholder image — Susan and Kirsty with the Stuart Highlanders New England Pipe Band and of course, the signed traffic cone.

Susan explained: “We were incredibly grateful to be invited to Party at the Palace for the full weekend, where our volunteers and I were raising awareness of the charity, speaking to festival-goers and fundraising to help us continue providing support within our community.

"We’re trying to raise money for a mental health and wellbeing centre. We want to create a space for people to come to because there’s nothing like that in this area at the moment.

"We do make ourselves different and I do come up with some crazy ideas.

"On the Sunday we knew the Boston pipe band were coming over so I had this idea about getting a traffic cone and taking it with us.”

Susan and Kirsty from Good Vibes Mental Health and Wellbeing Trust with the traffic cone at Party at the Palace.

During the World Cup, the Stuart Highlanders New England had teamed up with the Tartan Army in Boston for the Fenway Park takeover and they led the march to the baseball game in Boston.

They were invited to attend this year’s Party at the Palace by the organisers and were more than happy to attend.

Susan continued: "We took along our very own Good Vibes traffic cone and throughout the festival had members of the public, bands, performers, and others sign it and leave messages.

"It was just a crazy idea and I thought maybe we’d decorate it for them.

"So we got the cone, took it to along and then we were like ‘what should we do’ so we started with the wee stalls and got them to sign it. We went round them and got them to sign it and then as we went into the crowd we were getting people coming up to us like ‘can we sign it’, ‘can we get photos’.

"We were getting the bands to sign it and the comedy acts.

"It was mental, people were going daft over this cone.

We got loads of signatures – Ewan and Cat from STV Radio, Des Clarke, The Bluebells. We got police officers signing it, the paramedics, locals, people from Boston were there and signing it.

“Then we got to hand it over to the pipe band, which we didn’t think was going to happen.

"So they’ve now got this cone. They took it on the stage with them.

"They have now taken our signed cone with them meaning a little piece of our Bo’ness based charity will be making its way across the Atlantic to Boston.

They are going to give it a new home and send me pictures.

"We did not expect it at all, we just thought we’d take a cone and have a bit of a laugh with it.

"We’re called Good Vibes for a reason – it brought so many smiles to people’s faces.

"For a relatively new local charity it was such a surreal and special moment to see something that started here in our community suddenly creating a connection thousands of miles away.

"We had an incredible response throughout the weekend to the work we are doing around mental health, particularly the support we provide to children and young people.”