Concidence and Likely Stories

(from 2012)

...was the title of an album by Buffy Sainte Marie – folk singer, songwriter and Native American Activist. Most of it was put together using an Amiga computer. Remember those? When the album was released my daughter had just won a design competition on a national TV children’s program and was heavily into music. Her prize was a state-of-the-art Amiga computer – plus a coveted badge. So we bought the album.

Finally transferring the old CD to the iPod last week, the title made me muse on how coincidences in life really do happen. Obviously, a lot may depend on your circle of acquaintances – linked to perhaps profession, religion, hobbies or geographical location. The smaller the country and the larger your circle of contacts, the more chance there is of bumping into people you know in strange places.

But it is strange in life how coincidences can happen. Here in Britain (population in excess of sixty million) I’ve had my fair share of them. I don’t see omens in them – I don’t see anything spooky – but there one or two do stick in the mind.

I was courting a girl who lived in another country. (How that came about also involved coincidence, but that would make this post too long). She was actually working for the same religious charity I did, only she was in a land where, had she been discovered, she would have been deported. But our burgeoning relationship was a big secret. It was partly because I was very well known in a “big fish – small pond” syndrome, and also her family were very well known. Had it all gone pear shaped it could have been somewhat embarrassing. So until we knew the relationship had mileage in it, we tacitly agreed that our liaison was to be hush-hush.

So I bought this cheap package holiday trip to the country where she lived, and without telling a soul disappeared “on personal business” from the locality.

All was well and good until I boarded my train.

So there I am in the bar on the train travelling across the width of England, when a surprised “What are YOU doing here” startled me out of my reverie. An old girl-friend named L. She actually now lived over 300 miles from me, but had been visiting the man she eventually married when his tanker came into the oil refineries in West Wales. She was travelling home. She knew me well. Humph - very well. Knowing my propensity for mild paranoia, she thought it hilarious that I was trying to be so secretive. And no – chortle, chortle – she wouldn’t tell.

We had a pleasant two hour catch-up to London, where we went our separate ways. Wow – what a surprise that had been.

Then I am in the queue for passport control at Heathrow Airport and blow me down – there’s another “What are you doing here?” This time it is a girl named M. Not an ex this time – she’d been too young anyway when I lived in the same part of Oxfordshire a few years earlier, but I had worked with her mother for three years, and been a guest in their home every week.

She and another girl (who I also knew vaguely) were on a holiday – not only were they on the same flight, but they were staying in the same hotel. For the next week we kept on bumping into each other, in the restaurant, in the bar, in the pool – I don’t know who was more horrified. We never got around to the “No – she wouldn’t tell” conversation – and my “secret” was out.

You really can’t go anywhere it seemed.

Now wind the clock forward. I have been married to Mrs Occasional for a number of years. She ultimately returned to civilization to marry me. But now our original career plans have been amended. We are pushing a pram and getting into family history. I have trained for a profession that will put food on the table, and am organizing educational seminars up and down the country for CPD purposes – a means of turning something that should cost me money into something that would make me money. One of my older colleagues met through a professional association, lives in Scotland. She has the latest in computers whereas we only have a steam driven model. She offers to scan our family photos into the machine for our family tree programme. We send them to her. Immediately comes a telephone call. What on earth are you doing with a photograph of P and M?  They have the same photograph in their albums. It turns out that she and her husband had been in the RAF at the end of the war and for some years afterwards. In married quarters they had regularly done babysitting for an older couple. A lifetime later I had only gone and married one of those babies. The families had eventually lost touch after each left the services – they settling in Scotland and my wife’s family setting in Wales.

So yes – coincidence and (un)likely stories.

Those are some of mine.

What about yours?

From the original comment trail

How Occasional came to ever ask out the future Mrs Occasional has a level of coincidence about it. Since no-one else wants to share their coincidence stories, I’ll stick it in here.

In those far off and fairly innocent days, I had returned home from a thousand mile cycle ride (evidence of current madness and keep-fit youth) to film a local wedding – at which the sister of the bride took my – er – attention. Actually – smitten is the best word. So, with a reputation and a high profile in a certain circles, I am agonising over whether to ask her out or not. Obviously – yes, I will. But I must phrase this in a way that will cause no embarrassment on either side if the response is negative. And I must hurry up because she is going home abroad in a couple of days’ time.

So there I am in the capital city of a certain country – in one of its many bookshops. I am focussing on the shelves and going over all these conversations in my head on just how I can phrase things. How I can nonchalantly suggest a meal somewhere perhaps... A voice says in my ear “Hallo.” I turn from the Detective Fiction, and – aaagh – it’s HER!  We make brief small talk and she abruptly disappears. Later I learn that her brief hallo was greeted by me with a look of absolute horror as I almost jumped into the air. She thought what on earth had she done and made herself scarce. But I pursued her through the History to the Biography section and somewhere around the Paperbacks – humph – made my move. The rest as they say is history.

But I suppose it boded well that we met in a bookshop.