Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My parents (in their sixties then) had travelled on a Fred Olsens cruise dep and returning from/into Tilbury. They had arranged taxi transfers from home in Chandlers Ford (Hants) to get here and back. On the day of their return I took my son to Southsea (not a place I wnent to often) to pick up an antique item from an Antique shop - and afterwards, prior to lunchtime, we took the opportunity to promenade on the nearby Southsea beach. Whilst sitting on a bench this 'stranger' started talking to us - and whilst we were a bit unwilling to engage in conversation he mentioned that it was a special day - in that a cruise liner had made an unscheduled visit into port (nearby Portsmouth), after battling thru gales in the Channel. Nonchantly we asked him if he knew which ship - and he told us The Braemar. This is Fred Olsen Lines - and the ship my parents were travelling on. This was before mobile phones - so my son and I left immediately to go the ship and appeared at the same time as my parents were putting their cases into the back of a taxi - ready fro the trip back home. Everyone was pleased to see each other - except the taxi driver!

My wife and I cruise. One year we were on P&O's old Arcadia and my wife played shuffleboard in a team which included a particular lady. A few years later, at a different time of the year and on a ship in the Princess Cruises line, she went to play shuffleboard and met the same lady! Roger Kerr

My brother and I are exactly four years apart - both born on the same day. Both were natural births, within a few days of the relevant due dates. There are no other children.

When talking to my late husband about our pasts, we discovered that: At the end of the 1960s I had worked in Kampala, in a building which had previously been the old British HIgh Commission. I showed my husband a picture of me sitting in a room which he said had been his office some years earlier, before the High Commission moved to a new building. In the early 1970s I left Uganda and worked in the British Embassy in another country to which at that time he had also been appointed, but this posting was cancelled, so we did not meet. Instead he was sent to a third country to which, coincidentally, I decided to move the following year, and where I applied for a job - and we met! His name was Kenneth George, my brother was George Kenneth. His father was also George, and so was mine. In 1964 whilst at secretarial College in Kent, I lodged with a lady whose son was away at university, so I never met him. About thirty-five years later, in a different part of the country, I saw a doctor (whose name I did not know) in my local GP surgery, and seeing his face I burst out: "I knew your mother" . I was right.