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Message in a bottle (symbol image)
Photo: IMAGO
Moment of surprise for Peter Allan from Edinburgh, Scotland: The plumber had just sawed a hole in a customer's floor when he discovered something unusual.
Under the floorboards was a whiskey bottle with a message inside.
According to reports, it is a 135-year-old message from the craftsmen who once laid the floor.
According to the plumber, the room where the message in a bottle was found used to be a maid's room.
The 50-year-old couldn't believe it: "The room is three by four and a half meters and I saw around the bottle without knowing that it was there," he told the British BBC.
He had moved a radiator and wanted to know exactly where the pipes ran underneath.
He quickly ran down the stairs to the owner of the apartment and gave her the bottle.
Eilidh Stimmpson lives in the flat with her husband and two children, aged eight and ten.
She wanted to wait until the children came home from school to read the message with them, she told the BBC.
Shards kept in Tupperware box
They first tried to get the message out of the bottle with tweezers, but that was unsuccessful.
In the end, the bottle had to be smashed with a hammer.
"I feel terrible for destroying a 135-year-old bottle, but it was the only way I got the message," Stimpson said.
But: »I kept all the shards in a Tupperware box.«
It was "so exciting" to read the letter.
'James Ritchie and John Grieve laid this floor but they didn't drink the whiskey,' it read, along with the date: October 6, 1887. 'Whoever finds this bottle can imagine our dust blowing across the street .«
A family friend then found out that the two tradesmen had lived just a few miles away, in the Newington area of Edinburgh, near the old town.
After the spectacular find, the family now wants to continue the tradition: they are planning to make a message in a bottle themselves - in it a copy of the old and a new, personal message to posterity.
“The idea that the bottle has been there all this time and could have been there forever is intriguing.”
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