Cambridge Coincidences Collection

My honeymoon was arranged by my parents, who purchased everything based on vague instructions (near Carcassone, must have a pool, if I remember correctly). We didn't play any part in it beyond this. The wedding had about 40 guests, and went very well (it happened to be about the only dry day in a very rainy summer, but thats a different - and less impressive coincidence) We arrived at our honeymoon accommodation, and got talking to the owner (who was cleaning the pool). It transpired that he had family near where my wife had just moved from. In fact, on the same street doing the same work as one of my wife's friends. When we enquired if he knew her he answered "Yes - that's my sister" We told him that she had been at our wedding a few days earlier "Oh?" He replied "She did say that she was going to a wedding last weekend" (In short, a completely randomly chosen holiday home, in an area we had never previously visited of another country, was owned - and attended, by the brother of one of the 40 guests at our wedding. With whom she had previously discussed our wedding)

I worked for one of the London open top bus sightseeing tours from around 1993 to 1998. Initially I worked on the pavement for a few years as a supervisor (organising the departure of buses and so on) and in doing so got to know the various bus drivers and tour guides that started out or passed by the departure points I covered. One of my tour guide colleagues - Alice Robinson, who I believe is around 3-4 years younger than I - started around the same time as me and then was brought into the central office after a few years of service to be the sales rep selling tickets to the various agencies we dealt with around town. About a year after that I got reassigned to work in the main office as the marketing assistant. This then meant we worked together side by side on numerous occasions, typically travelling around town together seeing the ticket agents she dealt with, and in the course of our travels we naturally began to exchange snippets of our life stories. One thing we established was that both our fathers had served with the RAF, although while my dad flew on Vulcans, her father was in the RAF Regiment, the ground force tasked with protecting RAF bases.

I was taking the Oxford University entrance exam at school in Birmingham in 1981. One of the papers I had to take involved writing a precis of an unseen passage and then answering questions about it. On the morning of that paper I chose to practice by taking a book from the school library shelves (Rousseau's The Social Contract - not quite a random choice since I chose something that interested me but not something I had any reason at all to believe would figure in the exam), selecting a page at random and writing a precis of the argument. That afternoon the unseen passage in the exam came from the same section of the same chapter of the same book. When answering the comprehension section of the paper I was able to discuss in detail the way that Rousseau developed his argument in subsequent pages. I worried for weeks afterwards that the examiners would think that I must have cheated somehow because I showed specific knowledge that was so improbable.

I lost my address book in Cannes in 1968. Some months later I had a letter from a good friend of mine, Jacques, a Frenchman who had settled in Oslo. He told me he had my address book. His brother was in Cannes and had found the book. Seeing his brother's name in it, he posted it off to him in Norway. I was able to retrieve the book when I went back to Oslo the next year.