Just a coincidence?

[JustRob]

Have you encountered strange coincidences in your life? Have you even noticed them or have you just ignored them when they've happened? Mine got to the stage where I felt obliged to consider them more carefully and I have recently documented many of them on my website https://www.menstemporum.uk/, so please browse through them and see how they compare to your own. Many relate to a peculiar draft novel that I unexpectedly wrote in 2011 but it isn't necessary to read it as I describe the parts that relate to the coincidences within the accounts of the incidents.

As I had actuarial experience during part of my working life I have considered the probabilities and statistical explanations for the incidents but I find them unconvincing, so I feel forced to accept that there's some other factor at work. This may be delusion or illusion but I assure you that there is no intentional deception in the accounts. Anyway, I have tried to make the articles reasonably entertaining and thought provoking and will welcome any comments either here or at the email address given on the site as I am still searching for plausible answers myself, so feel free to pay it a visit.

[MrEd]

I had a pretty staggering co-incidence when I was a law student. I was working as a taxi driver to pay my way through Law School in the summer between the two courses, and I picked up a customer who took some stuff from a house to his market stall by my taxi. A couple of weeks later I was clerking in a law firm for work experience and, visiting a client on remand, I found that I had been the unwitting get-away driver in the burglary of my client's house, he was on remand falsely accused of attempted murder by his g/f and he said that her new b/f had burgled his house and she had fitted him up to get him out of the way. I confirmed the bare facts of the incident with him, stopped the interview and went to the police, his charges were dropped and the wrong'un got 3 years (including for an unconnected mugging), pleading guilty.

[dsm]

Here’s one. My brother was born in a hospital in Malta as our dad was in the Navy and was posted there. Well, 25 years later, living in southwest England he met a girl and they started going out. It turned out that she had been born the same week in the same hospital as him as her circumstances were identical.

[jhopgood]

I am continually coming across coincidences. In fact, I wrote a letter to the Blue, many years ago before I was OB editor, about CH related coincidences.
More recent ones concern my birth date, where there are two women in the village, one a local and the other a Brit who has a house there, and a good Catalan friend of my son, who all share my birthdate, but not the year. I also have an ancestor who was born exactly 100 years before me.
I have come to the conclusion that as there are a relatively few number of people who move around the world, (I have been abroad since 1973), it is not surprising in that we have many acquaintances in common.

[jhopgood]

A relatively recent one occurred here in Valencia. A friend from my junior school was visiting with a group of friends who had all been scouts together. I invited them for a beer and we were sitting in an outside bar. As one does, I asked where they used to live and one said he lived in a flat over the Coop on the council estate where I used to live. I remembered that when I was about 7 or 8 I had a friend whom I would visit in those flats. When I mentioned this he said “Yes, it was me!” This was about 2012 and I hadn’t seen him since about 1957.

[Katharine]

I have come to the conclusion that as there are a relatively few number of people who move around the world, (I have been abroad since 1973), it is not surprising in that we have many acquaintances in common.

I think this is true. We knew someone working for FAO, when we were in West Africa, he was there as a yam expert. We were surprised to meet him again in Islamabad - but there he was a potato expert!

I met someone in Sarawak who had many coincidences with my life. He came from the same part of Hertfordshire as I did, the only person ever to pick up on my saying a double VC was buried in our churchyard. He had taught Maths at the school where I did my teaching practice before going out as a VSO, several other things as well. The last time I saw him was when I literally tripped over his legs in the flight departure lounge at Manchester Airport.

[JustRob]

Thanks for your coincidences, if that was what they really were. Research into whether such things are simply random continues. I set up my website because I was encountering so many but mainly because I couldn't understand why and how I wrote an entire novel when I have never had any aspirations to write fiction in my life and many of my coincidences later related to things I'd written in the novel.

I had a small CH coincidence occur not many years after leaving the school. I was still living with my parents at that time and we moved from London to Kent. We registered with the local medical surgery and inevitably our assigned young doctor was also an Old Blue. On my first visit to him when I left his surgery the many ladies chatting in the waiting room had apparently found out that we went to the same school and they asked me how old he was as they all considered him to be rather good looking. His name was K G C Evans but I didn't know anything about his time at CH. Actually while in his surgery the coincidence that I noticed was that the blotter on his desk had been supplied by the company that I had worked for since leaving CH. That was hardly surprising though as one of the reasons for my parents deciding to move to Kent then apart from my father being about to retire was that my employers had also moved their office there, so had evidently been doing a bit of promotion with the local surgeries.

Since my weird experiences in recent years I have even had to review my reason for not applying to study pure mathematics at Cambridge after having been made a button Grecian on that assumption, a decision for which I was apparently considered notorious. I have often immodestly joked that I made that decision on my eighteenth birthday near the end of October 1962, which was the very month that Stephen Hawking moved from Oxford to Cambridge to continue his studies, and as Cambridge clearly didn't need both of us I didn't apply. Actually, much like writing an entire novel without knowing why at the time, I had no idea why I didn't want to go to university but now I do. Given the alternatives of spending much of my life debating the true nature of time with Stephen Hawking and probably always losing the argument or living the life that I did, I am very happy with my decision. That's the strange thing covered by my website, the idea that one can act in a particular way long before making the informed decision to do so, but only if one is the sort of person who trusts their intuition even when it may seem illogical at the time.

By the way, I understand that Stephen Hawking once invited time travellers to an event but didn't announce the invitation until after the event. If I were able to travel anywhere through time would my preference be to spend time with Stephen Hawking or go somewhere far more interesting? Evidently I have already answered that question if you think about it. Maybe all the time travellers thought the same as I believe that none of them turned up. When assessing time related incidents one has to consider all the relevant factors and hopefully I have on my website.

Thanks for giving me your time.