A message in a bottle. Photograph by Dread83
Before these digital and connected times, a nine year-old Adrian Lomas wrote a message in a bottle, and threw it in the ocean whilst on holiday to the Channel Islands hoping to discover a new friend from a new place with the power of words. That person was a nine year-old French girl called Emmanuelle Demeautis who found his bottle whilst walking her dog on Cherbourg beach.
They wrote to each other for many years, even making plans to meet in person in Tahiti a decade later, but it wasn’t to be. Life happened and the two drifted apart, got married and had families, and with time their correspondence faded away.
But our digital lives mean that we no longer need to dream of what could have happened to our young friends that were lost to time and distance, as a quick search on Facebook offers the chance of rediscovery every day. And this is exactly what happened with Emmanuel, who spotted that Adrian was riding the William Wates Tour de Force event this year, the cycling tour that precedes the Tour de France, and with that discovery connections were refound.
Taking her daughter with her of the two hour trip to the Causeway of Mont-Saint-Michel, Emmanuel met Adrian in person for the very first time, just 34 years since they began writing to each other. They already knew they had much in common, with Emmanuel’s father a champion cyclist and her cousin is working with a cycling team, but now the friendship was real, and after an emotional first meeting they have now made plans to get the families to meet each other properly.
