Balloon races and egg powder

At the village fete a few weeks ago a lady from the local care home was selling tickets for the Grand Balloon Race to raise funds for her establishment. Apparently in the past they have had balloon tickets returned from places as far afield as France and Holland. The person whose ticket is returned from the furthest destination wins a prize.

But it wasn't the prize that had me fishing the pound coin out of my pocket. It was more the possibility of making a tenuous, unlikely connection with someone whose life and experience is literally and figuratively hundreds of miles away from my own.

In the 1950s, whilst opening a packet of Australian powdered egg during the final days of war-time rationing, my Grandad found himself reading a name and address and the Alice-in-Wonderland-esque reqeust to "please write", scribbled on a scrap of paper and, presumably, inserted into the box by a factory worker down-under. This single act of launching a message-in-a-bottle from one side of the world to the other spawned a correspondence between 2 families who shared news and well-wishes for the next 2 decades.

Serendipitous connections make the world go round. They appeal to our sense of oneness with the rest of the human race. They are little miracles.