Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My Brother-in-law used to work in sales for Canadian National Railway and took a phone call from someone asking about a certain level crossing, how many trains a day, how noisy it was as the trains have to blow a whistle etc. My brother-in-law replied," Two trains a day, but you don't really notice them after a while." The caller asked how he knew and my brother-in-law replied, "You're looking at #xx on YYY Close, aren't you?" "Yes, how did you know?" "I live next door, it's a quiet street and a nice house." The man bought the house and lived next door for years.

In conversation with a woman that I had not met before at a dinner party in a village in Hampshire on a Tuesday evening in September 2005, she told me that in the late 1950's she had left mainstream school at the age of 13 and gone straight to the Junior Art School in Farnham. I had gone to art school (in Leicester) at the age of 17 in 1967; I had never previously heard of 13 year olds going to art school. I was envious ! The following Saturday I was at a large wedding party in the garden of a house in Blackheath London. In conversation with a woman that I had not met before she told me that in the late 1950's she had left mainstream school at the age of 13 and gone straight to the Junior Art School in Farnham. I thought that I was experiencing a deja vu from the conversation of 5 days previously. I was able to put these two women in contact with each other. They were the same age and had been friends on the same course at Farnham but had not met since the late 1950's.

When our children were quite small we had an Austrian au pair for a year. After she left we kept in touch with her and visited her a couple of times in Austria. She had a number of jobs over the years and travelled widely. I remember her saying once that she had worked in Ireland for a short time, but she gave no details. In recent years I have emailed her quite frequently to practice my German. A few years ago my wife asked my daughters where they would like to go for a summer holiday. My older daughter had no preference but my younger daughter was adamant she wanted to go to Ireland. Not knowing Ireland well we said we would think about this, and then my wife remembered a former colleague who had married an Irishman and lived in a small village somewhere. Apparently she rented out a holiday cottage. So my wife contacted her and sure enough the cottage was free for the two weeks of our holiday. We booked it. Sometime later I emailed our former au pair (to practice my German) with general family news. I said we were going to Ireland for a holiday. Over lunch that day I asked to my wife whereabouts we were going in Ireland.

As a child I was holidaying in Austria with my parents. Each evening the hotel would sit us with another English speaking family when we ate as the hotel had mainly German speaking guests. On the second evening I was talking about the tiny Irish village that my grandmother had recently moved back to. I described the village as having "one shop, two pubs and 3 cars make a traffic jam...." at this point a gentleman on the table next to us (who we had assumed to be German) turned around and commented "I happen to own that shop!" Every year from that point onwards he would send my grandmother a calendar!