Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My daughter was born in Morogoro, a small township l50 miles inland from Dar es Salaam. We returned to UK, and 30 years later ended up in Ilfracombe in North Devon running a small restaurant. My daughter was waitressing one evening and talking to a family of Asians, and the talk got round to birthplaces. They asked where Claire was born, and when she said Morogoro, Tanzania, the patriarch of the family slapped his knee in complete disbelief. His family ran the hotel in Morogoro. Coincidence?

I was on holiday and had run out of books to read and the only book in English that I could find in the hotel was "Hotel du Lac"The main charcter goes to a hotel and is given room307 I thought that seemed familiar and it was because i was sitting in room 307.Incidentally while lookig up the book to recall the number yesterday a page fell open at"A cold coming i had of it"which is a paraphrase from TS Eliot and I realised I could hear a play being broadcast on Radio 4 about T.S.Eliot. Another holiday I took 2 books with me to read .one was A Diary of a Nobody and the other was a modern book I hadn't read before by India Knight.In the modern book one character buys a copy of Diary of a Nobody for another. My father had a business phone number of Battersea 1905 for over 30 years and our home number of Cherrywood 6319 .He was born in 1905 and died in 1963. Almost on a daily basis i experience the coincidence of words.When I am reading a book,magazine,jar label etc etc I hear one of the words I am reading (complex words not "and" or "the" )simultaneously said on radio or TV usually in a completely different context often whole phrases

Coincidences We have had three increasingly amazing holiday coincidences. 1.On holiday in a hotel on the east coast of Yorkshire, in which county we live, we joined a couple at a table round the dance floor. We spent a pleasant evening together but other than learning that they came from the south coast we did not exchange personal details. However, after we had gone up to bed I remarked upon the uncanny likeness of the man to my father who had died only 18 months before. On a chance meeting the next morning I was told, by the lady from the previous evening, that she was looking for her tennis racquet in the car boot but that her husband was a doctor who insisted on having his boot full of medical equipment which made life difficult. Bingo! The likeness to my father the fact that he was a doctor and he came from the south coast prompted me to ask their name. It turned out that he was my father’s 1st cousin whom I had heard of but never met! 2.

Newly arrived to live in Tanzania in the l960's, I was invited to a party way way out in the back of beyond in a small township called Mbeya, 600 miles from anywhere. I wore a most distinctive dress I had bought in Brighton (my home town) in a tiny boutique. Imagine my surprise when another girl arrived in exactly the same dress, which she had bought in South Africa. "Great taste in fashion" we both decided! A coincidence when neither of us had bought the dress from a large retailer such as M & S or Debenhams. P.S It was a jolly good party!