Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My wife and I were visiting my elderly mother in Eastbourne a week ago, where she has lived in the same house for 27 years. The house was not new when she moved there, so both her downstairs and upstairs toilets have been there longer than that. I had to take my mother to the local GP's surgery that morning to have a leg wound dressed. Before leaving the house, I used the upstairs toilet but when I flushed the toilet, the handle broke. Removing the cistern lid, I saw that the plastic arm connecting the handle to the flushing mechanism had snapped. I told my mother about this and we both agreed that this was just bad luckand that it had clearly just worn out after so many years. We set off for the surgery, leaving my wife at my mother's house. While in the GP's waiting room, I received a text from my wife saying that she had just used the downstairs toilet, prior to going shopping, and that when she flushed the toilet, the handle had broken! This was within an hour of the handle of the upstairs' toilet breaking.

I went on holiday to Crete with a student group in 1961. I was eighteen. We went to Knossos. It was very touristy. We persuaded our driver to take us somewhere less crowded. We drove 40 miles down the coast to a temple complex which was completely deserted, apart from an englishman aged about 35 and his pre-raphaelite-looking wife and two young children. We briefly exchanged greetings. Six months later, the same englishman climbed a stile into our garden in our isolated holiday house in Snowdonia where I was staying with a university friend. He said he was lost and asked me the way to the village of Croesor. I recognized him and invited him in for a cup of tea. We got talking. He lived in Hampstead. So did I. He was the son of German jewish emigrants who had come to Britain in the 1920's (?). I am the son of a german jewish refugee who came to Britain in 1936. He attended the Hall School, Hampstead. So did I. He went to Westminster school. So did I. He studied French and German for A level. So did I. He went to Magdalen College, Oxford. So did I. He studied French and German. So did I. He became a poet.

This happened to my sister in law who was booked on an Air India flight out of Heathrow on Wednesday, 21 December 1988 to spend Christmas with her boyfriend in Alabama. The Air India flight was late in due to engine problems at its starting point so she was told she could rebook at no cost with either Pan Am or TWA. When she approached the 2 check-in desks which were near to each other, there was no one currently at the Pan Am desk so she turned instead to the TWA desk and re-booked on their flight. And the rest is history...

Sometimes I have the TV running in the background when I am reading or doing a crossword, and over the last few years have found increasingly that just as I read a word, phrase or number, it is spoken on the TV. The words or phrases might, at a stretch of the imagination, be attributable to frequency of use, but the numbers are another matter. The types of broadcast could be news, documentaries, sometimes a film, and so forth, so there is no particular type of programme in which it occurs. There are phases when it happens more than at other times, but it is still a source of bemusement. It has also happened while I have been travelling and talking to my husband. In these instances I say something and at the same instant we pass some billboard or sign which is a repeat of a word or phrase or number that I have spoken. I have a BSc and tend to try to attribute a scientific explanation rather than a 'woo-woo' one. I have my qualitative ideas about such things, but all I can say on a quantitative level is that I have observed these things happening.