Cambridge Coincidences Collection

Listen to this - I think it is quite an amazing co-incidence! Years ago I lived and worked in Namibia - or South West Africa as it was called then. Two of us spent a wonderful weekend camping in the Namib Desert. Namib means "vast" and it is all of that. Distances between places are huge and in those days I think the population in the whole huge country was something like one million people. Traffic on the main roads was minimal and in the desert virtually non-existent.

I have lived in various parts of the country over a forty year period and moved to my present address in Dorset 5 years ago. I signed on with a new doctor and on talking to the nurse at the 'introductory' medical found we had been born in exactly the same part of town in Portsmouth and later moved to exactly the same part of town at the north end of the island and attended the same school only fifteen years apart.

I was in my local (Worthing) Citroen garage collecting my car following it's service when there was a loud bang. Everybody in the place turned to look and saw a man holding his face in his hands. He had walked into the showroom window. A few minutes later, there was another loud bang and unbelievably, somebody else had done exactly the same thing. The staff at the garage could not understand what was going on and the service manager said he had worked at the same place for a number of years and that nobody had ever walked into the window before in all the time he had worked there.

In the spring of 1985 I was at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, marking the 300th anniversary of the birth of Handel. The exhibition contained several portraits and a number of music scores. Not unnaturally there was some background music going on as one walked round it. At the time I was visiting, the music was the composer's Music for the Royal Fireworks. And on a music stand was the original manuscript of... the Musc for the Royal Fireworks. As I approached the exhibit I noticed it was open at the movement called La Rejouissance. And the music playing was...