Slow Oceanic Internet Service:

A friend writes to me from England -- Dear Peter, I did something a year ago that you will disapprove of as an environmental bloke, but you might approve of as a dyed-in-the-wool romantic, which was to throw a plastic bottle into the ocean off Brazil (Recife, actually). I put a message in it with my phone number and the promise to pay 10 pounds to anyone who found it. Last week, it turned up. I got a call from an elderly gentleman on the Bay of Biscay, who seems to have been Basque or the equivalent. Anyway, he had phoned up his daughter who read English and she came down to his house and translated the message, and was on the line when he called. We chatted for a few minutes about oil spills (you would have been happy), and I took down their address, and am sending their postal order in this same batch of mail. Childish, really: but the best thing about it was that I had totally forgotten about it. What other things do we send out for the fun of it, and someday come back? yours, XXXXX