By Tim Binnall
A bizarre mystery surrounding a slew of novelty Garfield phones that have continuously washed ashore along a coastal region of France for more than three decades has finally been solved. The strangeness reportedly began back in the 1980s when residents of several Iroise Sea beachfront communities began noticing pieces of plastic phones depicting the beloved cartoon cat popping up all over the place. Beyond being something of an eyesore in the picturesque region, the orange debris proved to be particularly maddening because no one could figure out where the parts came from, yet they kept washing ashore.
The weird debris became so iconic in the area that the Garfield phones were actually featured heavily in an environmental awareness campaign about beach litter that launched last year. And, as luck would have it, the attention afforded to the strange plastic parts wound up jogging the memory of a local farmer who, amazingly, knew the source for the phones. He explained that they had come from a shipping container that had fallen off of a cargo ship and washed ashore during a storm.
The farmer subsequently took a team of anti-litter activists to the shipping container's precise location in a hard-to-reach cave, where they found a number of pieces of Garfield phones strewn along the nearby rocks. Inside the fissure, the group were amazed to find the sizeable metal box that had been 'leaking' the annoying litter for the last three decades. Alas, they were unable to remove the container because it was wedged under some rocks, meaning that while the mystery of the phones' origin may have been solved, the problem they presented to the region will seemingly continue for quite some time.