Cambridge coincidences

Coincidences have been an intermittently lively topic between two Cambridge graduates over the years. I remark on them; my wife wonders about the ones we don't know about. So here are some examples. I left the army to take up my Cambridge place in 1958, but two years later, while visiting a friend, he took me to Chipping Camden for the afternoon. There I encountered one of my former messmates from our regiment in Hong Kong who was simply making a one-day walking trip to the Cotswolds. A coincidence, to be sure, but enhanced by a shout from a rooftop where a third member of that not large mess hailed us as he was fixing an aerial to his chimney: someone with whom I was no longer in contact and of whose whereabouts I had been ignorant. My wife, Hilary and I, with our two young daughters, were sitting at a table in a crowded cafeteria in the University of Nsukka in 1972. I was there to give a lecture but the cafeteria was crowded with conference delegates and we were lucky to grab seats on the last available table. So we were not put out when an American lady with her young daughter asked if they could occupy two of the remaining few places. Courteously she began her introductions with her daughter, who, to our surprise, had the same first and surname as my wife . It turned out that her husband was a biologist attending the conference but it is not the sort of coincidence one expects in fairly remote Nigeria. Which reminds me of a story told by the Headmistress of a mission school in Kano. She had just purchased one of the first Toyotas to be imported to Nigeria and was making the long journey homewards from Lagos. She had left the rainforest region and was in the less populated Northern savannah when to her horror her gearstick came away in her hand. Her car came to a gradual halt and she found herself opposite a 'compound' consisting largely of a round straw-roofed hut. Before she could gather her wits a smiling mechanic in Toyota overalls emerged with a tool kit and, having greeted her, told her he was the only trained Toyota mechanic in Nigeria, who happened to be visiting his family that week-end. Well, it was a Christian school so I have to believe her. And for the unknown one? This is more complicated. As an adolescent I had a girlfriend who meant a lot to me and although we drifted apart we both probably felt our relationship had been significant. Thus it was, that some 50 years on when she had suffered a marital breakdown in France and sought assistance from an analyst, she was prevailed to retrace her growing-up and, through the internet, found my address and sought my side of what she remembered. That is not relevant but the coincidence lies in the fact that my family and I spent a sabbatical year in Paris and my 11-year-old son attended a bilingual school for that year. I turns out that my friend's daughter was in the same year at the same school but in the French rather than the bilingual class. We did not discover this. We did not meet, despite living close by. So we did not realise the coincidence at the time and would never have done so in the normal course of events. As my wife points out - it is remarkable if three acquaintances find themselves, by coincidence, together in a railway carriage; but is it not also a coincidence if they happen to be in three adjacent railway carriages and do not discover each other?