Headway Cambridgeshire writes:
Tickets to enter the race were sold for £1 each and contestants could enter as many times as they liked, simply by buying more tickets. The tickets were all numbered and each one had the contact details of Headway Cambridgeshire on them.
On the grand launch day, all the entry tickets having been tied to helium filled balloons, the balloons were launched. Clients and staff of Headway Cambridgeshire gathered on the front lawn opposite Headway House – in those days we were based at Brookfields Hospital, Mill Road in Cambridge. All the balloons were released and it was a wonderful sight to see them rising high into the air and drifting away, carried by the wind.
As we know from Isaac Newton, ‘what goes up, must come down’ so we knew the balloons would all have to land somewhere eventually – but where? We all wondered where they would end up and how far away the furthest one would travel. The one that had travelled the furthest would determine the winner.
Each ticket carried the message that this was part of a charity balloon race and asked for the ‘finder’ to send the ticket back to Headway Cambridgeshire with an indication of where the ticket and balloon was found. This relies on the good will of the ‘finder’ and we had quite a lot of tickets returned. Some had been found in various counties across the east of England and some had travelled overseas. We had a pre-arranged closing date though, and eventually a winner was established. We were pleased that the winning ticket was found by a child from as far away as Europe and we notified them.
Since then many things have happened at Headway Cambridgeshire and we eventually forgot about the 2008 charity balloon race. Imagine our surprise then, when in spring 2014, we received a letter from a Norwegian fisherman enclosing a ticket he had found at sea. The ticket had got caught in his fishing nets and although very waterlogged, the writing was still visible enough for him to read it and send it to Headway Cambridgeshire. Even though we had changed address a year and a half ago, his letter still reached us.
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We are afraid that the competition closed long ago and so we cannot declare this ticket a winner but we think the fisherman deserves a prize for finding the ticket that has survived the longest – so far. Our clients were amazed by this story too and one of them has created an original piece of artwork depicting a coastal scene with boats, which we are sending to the fisherman as a prize.
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