Message in a Bottle
"I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle, yeah." - The Police
One morning this week, while out for my constitutional, I spotted a woman walking her dog with a bottle of wine in her hand. It seemed a bit early to be on the sauce, I thought, but as she got closer, she informed me that there appeared to be a note in the bottle but she couldn’t get it out.
Immediately, I was fascinated and had images of someone, somewhere, on a desert island trying to get a message out to the world that they were, in spite of some catastrophe, still alive somewhere off the radar and hopelessly stranded.
The piece of paper in the bottle looked like it had some symbols on it that, we thought, may have been Russian or Arabic, and this added to the exotic sense of adventure of the whole affair.
After trying to poke our fingers in the bottle to retrieve the paper, we realised doing so was useless, and so the lady suggested we use a stick. The first stick we used wasn’t much good, so then we got two smaller sticks and tried to use them like chopsticks so as to grip the paper and pull it out. But it was hopeless.
After about 10 minutes trying to get the message out of the bottle, I suggested we break it, to which the lady replied a firm no as she didn’t want to break glass on the beach. I said that we could pick up the pieces and bin them at which point she said we could do so up by one of the bins, but not on the beach.
So, after about 20 minutes of fascination about what obscure message might be contained in this mysterious bottle, we broke it open and unravelled it.
The note inside read:
“Dear she/he, you have a sharp eye for paper. My name’s A _ _ _. I wuz born in January 17th, 2012, wich makes me gen alpha. My number +35387 *******.”
It concluded with a big smiley face. The date at the top was July 28th, which was the day before. And it turned out what we thought were Russian looking symbols on the other side were nothing of the sort, not as far as could be discerned with Google Translate anyway.
The whole adventure was a little bit anti-climatical in the end, but for a few minutes early of a Monday morning, two forty-somethings felt all the sense of wonder of a couple of five-year-olds.
:)