Cambridge Coincidences Collection

In 2002 I was returning from New Zealand after a 6 week retirement holiday which my husband & I had planned together in 1994. Unfortunately he died in 1995, but I decided to go alone after retirement in December 2001 from the company we both had worked for. On the leg of the journey from Sidney to Bankok my seat was the centre of three, the passenger on the left embarked at Sidney & I thought it strange that the stewards seem to think we were together. My husbands name was John Walkley, and this passenger told me his name was Owen Walkley, no relation though! After he had left the plane, I started a conversation with my right hand passenger, his name turned out to be Steve Nichols, the same name as the person who had been my husband's deputy at work. I found it weird but strangely comforting!

When I was 16 years old I was at boarding school in St Andrews, Scotland (1972). My parents were living in Beirut. There was an archeological dig going on in the town and I volunteered to participate. I was in a trench, chipping away at a wall and next to me was a young man, a student at the university. We struck up a conversation and when I mentioned my name, he asked me if I was related to Dr Mahmud Ghul. I said 'yes, he's my father'. He then told me he'd been in Lebanon the week previously where he'd gone specifically to meet my father (an academic) and had dinner with him and my mother.

My husband and I met in London in the early eighties. We discovered that not only were my grand mother and his parents buried within twenty miles of each other in Switzerland/Italy but his previous girlfriends' family lived in the same village as my mother in Scotland!

I have a brother who lives in Australia and at the time of this story we were in the process of planning a visit to see him. Three of us intended to go, my wife and myself along with my mother who was a sprightly 78 year old at the time. Part of the preparations for the trip involved the obtaining of visas in order to enter Australia and the application for these visas had to include passport-type photographs. Some months before the Australia trip, my mother came to stay with us in Derby for a couple of weeks. She lived in Nottingham, we saw her regularly but occasionally she came to stay with us. The time came for her to go home so, one evening after tea, we decided to take her back to Nottingham. It occurred to us that there was one of those machines at Derby railway station which produces passport photographs. Knowing we needed such photographs for our Australia visas, we decided to call at the station on the way to deliver mother back to Nottingham. I make the point here that I very rarely visit Derby station, less than once a year.