Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My wife and I were taking a flight to Canada to attend a friend's (Mike L) 50th birthday party. We hate flying and were dreading sitting for 6 hours with people we didn't know. The couple who eventually sat next to us thankfully spoke little until we were about an hour from Toronto, when the usual banter started - "Have you been to Canada before?" - The two ladies chatted away until her eyes glazed over slightly, she conferred with her husband, and then turned to my wife and said "Are you by any chance going to "Mike L's birthday party?". How about that! Two couples, both going to the same party, one couple living in the UK, one couple travelling in the UK, but from Canada. We were both on our way to the same party - only 100 people or so. And both find ourselves on the same flight and sitting together! We have since become great friends!

I was living near York attending college and 2 Australian girls I knew were on holiday, got my landlady's tel no from my mother and rang her. She said I was at college and would be home at 16:30, but left them the address. She then went to York shopping. When she returned and when I got home, she said she was approached in York by a young lady who asked her if she knew how to get to the village and house in which she was resident. My landlady asked if she was one of the girls who had phoned her earlier. Of course it was. Now York's a pretty big place, so the odds on asking my landlady are? Well, go figure.

In 2005 while working in the Auchterarder Tourist Office a gentleman came in asking for information about the Lancaster Bomber which had once been part of an aircraft collection at the Strathallan Aircraft Museum. The Museum had been closed for over twenty years but we were continually asked about it. I told the gentleman that there had been a Lancaster Bomber at the Museum but thought it had been moved to England when all the planes were dispersed. He was amazed to learn that it had been in the collection as he thought it must have been very difficult to get such a large plane to land on a small airstrip (now a parachute club uses it) He had only been gone a few minutes when another gentleman came in to the office and we got chatting about various things. I told him that I had just been chatting about a Lancaster Bomber that had been flown in to Strathallan and he started laughing. Turns out he was one of the crew who brought the Lancaster back from Canada to Strathallan!! Quite a hairy journey by all accounts but I was so annoyed that he had not come in to my office 5 minutes earlier.

In the summer of 1989 I got a new job working for the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) as a Tutor Organiser. The departing Tutor Organiser was part of the interview panel and I already knew him a little through my old job. That summer I went with my husband and children to the Dordogne in France on holiday and we decided to explore a castle in one of the towns. As we climbed the medieval spiral stone steps of one of the towers we met the Tutor Organiser and his wife coming down and we met in the middle. We were rather loud in our greetings and sharing the hilarity of the meeting and were asked to leave the tower! We went and had ice creams in the grounds. Neither of us had shared holiday plans and so it felt like a total coincidence. The other thing I found out in that conversation - which is less of a coincidence but struck me at the time - was that at that time he was the only person of my acquaintance who had watched every episode of Twin Peaks which had recently shown.