Letter in a Bottle is pleased to offer a gift that is original and of the highest quality. We use only the best materials to ensure a finished product that will surprise and delight. This memorable message in a bottle gift can be used to convey a message that will never be forgotten, always remembered and valued.

Each Letter in a Bottle is hand assembled and finished to the highest standards with meticulous attention to detail. This ensures that each bottle and its letter and message has been assembled with loving care, using only the finest imported bottles and after applying our original designs and finishing touches. Letter in a Bottle is a British-based craft business.

I sent a request for help – perhaps the website could include a small advert about my search – but received no reply.

The Californian version, www.messageinabottle.com, spoke less of craft and more of the sea air . . .

Is it our proximity to the ocean that fires our designers’ imagination in creating our magnificent bottles? Is it the stimulus they receive from contemplating breathtaking seascapes that serves in their creative process? Or is it the natural beauty from the rolling hills to the windswept cypress trees to the quaint shops that do this? We believe it is all of these.

This idyllic setting, where the salt air is permeated with romance and good times, is one of our greatest assets in creating bottles that are able to inspire poems and love letters alike. It is our hope that our bottles will inspire you.

Within a day I had a courteous reply offering to help, and immediately sent off information and a photograph of the bottle. This was posted on the website shortly afterwards but attracted no response.

The English and American sites were purely consumer-orientated, though from a poetic and artisanal point of view naturally, while the French site was mournful and cathartic.

‘Bouteille à la mer’, www.unebouteillealamer.com, showed a sad little bottle floating on the screen, surrounded by tears.

Fed up of living, of solitude, anguish, depression? Write down your words, put them in a bottle, then throw them into the internet ocean . . . The bottle will break, and somewhere someone will read your words.

. . . The author of this site is qualified in clinical and pathological psychology. He has worked for the last ten years in a psychiatric hospital and spends the greater part of his time carrying out psychological follow-ups to patients in a clinic attached to this hospital . . . The theoretical application on which his practical work is based derives from Jacques Lacan.

The aim of this site is not to provide a specific response to suffering. It serves merely as a springboard to suffering, that it may travel and touch someone by the randomness of its voyage. The person who receives the message may choose whether to reply or not, but whatever the choice, the message will have been read.

Permitting oneself to throw the mask of grief into the water and address the unknown is perhaps the first step towards seeing a smile in one’s reflection.