Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My wife and I live in Scotland and about two years ago we had friends from the south staying with us for a few days. When they left on a Saturday they decided to break their journey home and booked an overnight stay at a Bed and Breakfast place just outside Nottingham. My wife and I were going to off to stay with friends in Suffolk leaving on the following Thursday after our friends left. On the Tuesday of that week we attended the funeral of an elderly (100 year old) friend. We also decided to break our journey going south and we called our friends to see if they would recommend the Bed and Breakfast they stayed at. They gave us a glowing report so we duly booked there for the Thursday night. When we arrived the hostess invited us to join her for a drink and she asked us where we had travelled from that day. We told her we had come from Scotland and she said that she and her husband had just returned from Scotland themselves. Further discussion revealed that they had been at the same funeral as we had, sitting just behind us in the church. It transpired that the lady who had died had been the nanny of not only the Bed and Breakfast hostess but also of her children.

After locking the passenger door on my auto I dropped my keys. As the keys were falling I realized that I was standing over a sewer grate and I said "goodbye" to my keys. The keys fell onto a crossbar on the grate (there are far more holes than crossbars). With great relief, I picked them up and walked in to the church where I was attending a colleague's funeral.

In March last year, I went to see the house which my son and fiancee had just bought in Wivenhoe, just outside Colchester. As I left for the airport, my husband put an entirely random Spectator into my hand, to back up my reading for the weekend. The next morning, awaiting breakfast in the tiny b and b just beside the cotttage, I opened the Spectator and read a review of the memoirs or autobigraphy of the comedian Ronnie Corbett: apparently on returning to his theatrical digs one evening he had seen his landlady lying on the kitchen table "under Semprini". Her only reaction to this intrusion was to turn her head and say "Oh Mr Corbett, what you must think of me"! Half an hour later and fifty yards away on the quay, we met a resident of Wivenhoe, who told us that among other celebrities who had lived in the village was - Semprini! I retired behind a boat to hide my mirth, but a fortnight later, when my son had a sight of the deeds of the cottage which he had just bought, he found that the last owner but one had been - Semprini!

My wife and I were travelling back home to Yorkshire and parked the car on the ferry (in Cherbourg). We began talking to the lady in the next car who turned out to be a friend (whom we had never met) of my wife's daughter and their children go to the same school.