Cambridge Coincidences Collection

This is a good friend of mines story. He ordered a book on ebay not looking at where the seller lived. I believe the book to be "the fundamentals of motorvehicle technology". Anyway, he placed the order and it said dispatch would be 2-3 days, about 30mins later athere was a knock at the door with a man delivering the book. He lived on the same street! What are the chances, and he didn't get his delivery charge back lol.

In the early 1900s my grandparents took a house for a short time in Southend-on-Sea. Next door lived a musical family with four children with whom my aunts and uncles played regularly. Indeed, for as long as I can remember my aunt had talked fondly of those days and wondered what had become of them all after they moved away. In 1979 a school friend who lived close by in my home town of Seaford introduced me to her cousin, the man who later that year was to become my husband. One day shortly after my aunt had died my husband and I were talking about our relatives and to my great surprise I was hearing names like Lalla, Kitty, Mamie and Hilda which were the names of the neighbours who lived next door in Southend. It turned out that it was indeed my husband's family who had lived next door eighty years ago and that both our mothers had been delivered by the same doctor. In my family albums we have photos of my husband's aunts pushing my mother in her pram and both families playing together in the garden all those years ago in Southend. I had often asked my mother who the children were in our albums never for one moment thinking they would one day be my in-laws.

In 1973 I was 23 years old and I worked for the World Alliance of YMCAs in Bangladesh. I worked in 2 remote villages setting up community projects. One was in a village called Brahmanbaria. This village is a bit out of the way and in 1973 Bangladesh was rebuilding in the aftermath of the war of independence (1971-2), consequently white Europens were very rare and hence the locals, and in particular the local children saw me as a quite curiosity and often used to watch me coming and going from the project. Actually unbeknown to me at the time, my presence in the village was widely known and commented upon. Apparently the children used to refer to me as "Mr Robin". I finished my time their and went on to pursue a career in social work in Australia ( where I come from ) and in England where I now live. My current work largely involves training and teaching people who are training to be social workers or who wish to pursue post qualification courses in social work. Recently I was running a training course in Maidstone in Kent for social workers who have left the profression but wish to return and so need to brush up their knowledge of the law and current procedures.

Summer 2007 I received a handwritten letter at work (I work at the Conquest Hospital in Hastings). The letter was from someone called Aly who was researching their family tree and mentioned my Dads name and his eldest Sisters name (my Aunt). I telephoned the contact number in the letter and arranged to meet Aly the following weekend in a local pub. It turns out that my Aunt had twins when she was 16 - a dark family secret that I knew nothing of. Aly was one of the twins, She had moved to St Leonards-on-Sea (East Sussex) the same year I did (1991) and had been living about 3 miles from where I lived. The really miraculous thing was how she found me - After her adoptive parents died, Aly decided to try and trace her birth mother. with the help of her best friend Patricia she managed to find two names she thought may be relatives but then became stuck, a bit of a dead end and made no further progress. Back in 1995 I had a trainee working with me called Kate, I got on well with Kate and kept in touch after she left to live and work in Cornwall. After a few years Kate got a Job at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead.