Our childhood holidays were pretty ordinary; we would visit family in Grasmere or Devon, eat ice cream, try to catch fish, go for long walks on moors or mountains. Then one day we were invited by a great aunt to stay in her static caravan in Filey.
Filey is similar to all the other east coast seaside towns: a slightly pebbly beach, pale brown sea, fish & chips and thunderstorms. There were a lot of toys and games in the caravan: Cleudo for rainy summer days, of which there were many.
In those long-distant days, children could be allowed out of their parents’ sight for hours on end. Nick and I would blow all our pocket money in the amusement arcades, maybe saving 12p [yes, 12p] for a tray of chips; then we would play on the boating lake with his Action Man dinghy; or we’d go beachcombing in the middle of the day and find odd trainers and stinky dead fish.
One day we took it into our head to throw a message into the sea. It would drift off to a faraway land, and be picked up by exotic foreign people. We wrote a Dear Penpal style letter about ourselves, and stuck one of those little self-adhesive address labels to it. Then we rolled it up and stuffed it into a wine bottle, and Dad jammed the cork in as far as it would go. We waded out to sea and flung the bottle into the waves.
Then we forgot about it and went to lose more money in the penny slot machines.
About six months later, we had a letter from a german boy who had picked up our bottle while he was on holiday in Holland. Seawater had managed to get past the cork, and washed away everything we had written, leaving only the self-adhesive address label legible.
The moral of this tale is that, should you be stranded on a desert island, the message in a bottle technique does not guarantee a speedy response. Also, don’t forget to use a self-adhesive address label.