Message in a bottle answered 23 years later

In 1990, 10-year-old English girl Zoe Lemon threw a message in a bottle into the North Sea. In 2013, she finally received a reply.

Now known as Zoe Averianov, the 33-year-old says she was given an answer to her childhood letter when her parents visited her on Christmas Day, reports Mirror Online.

The letter, thrown off a ferry that Averianov was catching from England to Hull with her family on September 12, 1990, included information about the schoolgirl's hobbies ("ballet, playing the flute and the piano") and pets ("a hamster called Sparkle and fish called Speckle").

"Please would you write to me, I would like it a lot," she wrote.

The request was granted by Piet Lateur, a Dutchman who stumbled upon the plastic bottle holding Averianov's message while walking his dog in dykes near his home.

"I am keeping your little letter on my piano," he said in his reply.

"I know you are no longer a little girl but you asked me to write you so I have."

Averianov, who said seeing her childhood handwriting on the letter "made me a bit emotional", says she has been in contact with Lateur via email — a somewhat speedier form of communication.

Source: Mirror Online