‘To all the ships at sea and all the ports of call, to my family and to all friends and strangers.’

I had been lounging comfortably, glass of wine in hand, gently revelling in the guilt-free sensation of watching a schlock film in the interests of research when the phrase hit me like a cold wave. My drink spilt as I almost fell out of my armchair.

‘This is a message, a prayer. The message is that my travels taught me a great truth. I already had what everyone is searching for and few ever find: the one person in the world whom I was born to love forever . . . The prayer is that everyone in the world can know this kind of love and be healed by it. If my prayer is heard there will be an erasing of all guilt and all regret and an end to all anger. Please God. Amen.’

Somehow Hollywood had got hold of my letter. I felt a mixture of outrage at the invasion, triumph at having tracked down at least a part of the letter’s source, and horror that the opening lines of my letter had been plagiarized.

I wound and rewound my VCR to take a note of the words, before running to compare them with my letter in a bottle. Just as when I discovered from Evian that the bottle had only been in the water for a maximum of four months, so I now felt I had made a real leap forward in understanding my letter-writer. Now I knew that she had definitely watched this film, and that it had had a great impact on her. On the other hand, my search felt just a little tarnished. The opening lines of her letter were not original, though the translation into French and back again had introduced some small differences. But neither was my search original. I was simply recreating the clichéd tale of a best-selling novel and its film adaptation.

Theresa, aided by her ‘research department’, manages to track down the paper on which the letter was written within the next two minutes. If only my letter-writer had supplied a clue as to her location. Or if only I had access to such an effective ‘research department’. The other main difference between my ‘real’ letter and the filmic one is that the object of her love is her son, not her lover. And that my letter-writer is real. I think. Apart from the opening paragraph, and a little extract at the end, that are taken from the film, she writes her own letter. I think.