Cambridge Coincidences Collection

This happened in approx the year 2000. One evening, a friend and I were trying, unsuccessfully, to remember the theme tune to the 1980s TV series "Tales of the Unexpected" (by Roald Dahl). The next day, I was walking down the road and a busker was playing the theme tune on his harmonica! Doubly bizarre wouldn't you say?!

This happened in 1996. I was on a photography course in Banbury, and lived 3 miles outside the town. My daughter was living just outside Chesterfield in Yorkshire. I was set a project called 'The Journey' and had to produce a number of photographs depicting a journey of my choice. I decided to record my grocery shopping trip. This involved me taking a bus from the village into Banbury, then another bus to Tesco. This was a trip of approximately an hour and a half because I was stopping to take photographs at various places. I took photographs at the bus stop, on the bus, in the bus station, the bus driver and passengers, and people walking along the road. I got to Tesco and my last photograph was to be of the main door with all its great reflections. I looked through the viewfinder of my camera and my daughter was standing in front of the main door, waving at me. On the spur of the moment she had decided to visit friends and had driven down the M1 and then the M40 from Chesterfield. She still had quite a long way to go and feeling hungry she took a detour off the M40 to Banbury Retail Park to buy a sandwich from Tesco.

I am about to visit the loo when an unexpected parcel drops through the front door. I open it and it is a present of poet Douglas Dunn's 'The Year's Afternoon'. I take the book into the downstairs loo with me but the extractor fan there is noisy and does not go with poetry. So I migrate to the bathroom upstairs,. I sit down, open the book at random and read: 'The Expelair in the lavatory - Relentless thing - is a better orator Than I would want to be'

The following text comes from an email which I sent to a friend on 28 April 2013: "Thank you for extending this discussion* into the fruitful field of nominative determinism - which of course explains my commitment to Freedom of Information and my confident expectation of being appointed the next head of the Information Commissioner's Office. To my delight and surprize, the subject was raised substantively on 24 April in the Royal Courts of Justice during the Judicial Review of the Chagos Marine Protected Area (MPA). That was the day for arguing points of EU law and Maya Lester QC, appearing for Olivier Bancoult, tickled the largest unprotected nerve in their Lordships' bodies [always a good move in court, sometimes even leading to a victorious debarquement on the Mornington Crescent quayside] by telling them that by a happy coincidence she had just discovered the previous evening that the head of one of a key body regulating the French fisheries industry was a certain "M.