Message in a bottle widower blasted
‘ Total disregard for our beautiful clean river’
A lonely British widower looking for love using hundreds of bottled messages has been reprimanded for polluting the ocean.
Londoner Craig Sullivan, 49, lost his wife to cancer 18 months ago. This summer, he devised a plan with his 17- year- old daughter to drive around the U. K. in an RV, tossing bottled messages into the ocean seeking female companionship.
“I will just say it. I am lonely. I miss the simple acts of companionship and sharing … Noticing and being noticed. Helping each other. Talking . Making things together,” he writes on BottleReply. com, a website accompanying the project.
Sullivan was inspired by the 1979 hit song Message in a Bottle by Sting and the Police. In it, a lonely castaway describes sending out a bottled message only to be met with “a hundred billion bottles” in reply.
Instead, as Sullivan’s bottles began littering British beaches he was barraged with environmental complaints, including an official protest filed with the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
“Your total disregard for our beautiful clean river is palpable … don’t come back” wrote one resident of the Scottish town of Newton Stewart, where Sullivan had dropped several hundred bottles in a local river.
Sullivan’s bottles are glass, and on rockier beaches they were shattering on the shore. Within hours of some of Sullivan’s bottle releases, whole teams of shore volunteers were needed to mobilize in order to clean them up.
The typical British widower usually turns to online dating. Indeed, there are several websites that cater specifically to widows and widowers. But as Sullivan wrote online, it “seemed clichéd or somehow less elegant, less noble in intentions.”
“If you’re a lady looking for love, then today we might be the two luckiest people on the planet,” read the pink note contained within Sullivan’s bottles.
Interested readers were then directed to a website in which Sullivan provides his contact information and lays out his suitability as a mate.
After his phone kept pinging with what he called a “rather unpleasant backlash,” Sullivan called off his bottle journey this week.
Although, he told the BBC that 50 women have contacted him and he already has a couple dates lined up.