Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Long shots: a challenge

Andrew at WongaBlog describes a nice coincidence in which a parcel for him went undelivered and was then ‘returned’ to someone who hadn’t sent it to him, but who knew him anyway.

Which reminded me of the biggest coincidence I’ve ever been involved in:

When I was 13 and at school in Cambridge (UK), one of my best friends moved to Canada because his dad had got a job there. They got their visas, school places and a house sorted out, and so the dad duly turned up at his new place of work. He obviously wanted to get to know his new colleagues, and it turned out, much to his surprise, that the guy in the next office had lived in Cambridge in the early 1970s…

In my house.

Can anyone better that?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I can try...

After leaving University in the 70s, I used to visit a friend living in a hippy ashram in Sheffield. At a party there, I had a one-night stand with one of his housemates, but didn't keep in touch afterwards.

About ten years later, after I had moved from Manchester to London, met my wife, and had a daughter, we shared a nanny with a local friend of my wife's from Reading University. Eventually the friend married her partner, and at the wedding party I was introduced to her maid of honour, her best friend from school in Redcar - the woman of the Sheffield one-night stand.