Love, “that wound of frightful intimacy.” Roland Barthes.

The bottle that found its destination

 In 1914, Briton Thomas Hughes, at the age of 26, after embracing his wife Elisabeth and his daughter Emily, aged two, left for the front to join the Second Light Infantry Company of Durham, part of the Third Corps of Expeditionary Forces of the British Army.  Once embarked, he wrote a brief letter to his wife, folded the paper into an envelope, and put it in a ceramic gin bottle and he threw it into the sea.  Twelve days later he was shot down in French battlefields. War ended, and then came the Second World War which also concluded, and the bottle continued sailing.  In April 1999, in other words 85 years after soldier Thomas cast his love letter to the sea, Steve Gowan, an Essex fisherman, found the bottle by chance in his nets in the Thames.  He removed the cork, read the message and, without hesitation, he traveled 17,700 kilometers to New Zealand to find Emily Crowhurst, daughter of Elisabeth and her deceased father.