Chance meetings

I have two stories: No. 1: In the Summer of 1982 I travelled to Montepulciano in Italy by train to play in a music festival leaving my girlfriend in London. The journey was scheduled to last a couple of days. The day after I left my girlfriend met three string players who planned to go to Italy to busk as a string quartet (she was a violin player); and they invited her to join them. They left the next day and planned to start in Rome. During the string quartet's train journey (not in Italy) they were joined in their railway carriage by a women and they quickly realized they were all English and musicians. She was also travelling to the same music festival I was playing in. My girlfriend asked her to see if she could find me when she arrived there to pass on a message that she was in Italy and planned to come to Montepulciano. The day after I arrived in Montepulchiano I was at a place where all festival participants gathered (probably about 300 to 400). The girl who had met my girlfriend arrived from the train station and came directly to the gathering place and immediately approached me to see if I knew the recipient of her message (me!). Stories, messages and surprise were exchanged. She told me her name which I said was funny because I had spoken (for the first time) to someone of the same name from my office concerning a business matter the day before I left for Italy (she worked for a music publisher and I as a music editor for BBC Radio 3). She was the same person. The conversation had been brief and business-like. [This story, I remember, did have a few other coincidences occurring concurrently but it's been 33 years and they have gone from my memory over the years.] No 2 I attended a party in London with my girlfriend in 1978. We met a very nice chap and will all hit it off particularly well, and just had a fun evening of convivial chat. At the end of the evening we bid each other farewell with no plans for further contact. The next day my girlfriend and I travelled to Malmo in the South of Sweden. The day we arrived, being a musician, she suggested going to the backstage coffee bar of the town concert hall to see if there were any old friends there (she came from Malmo). We walked in to the coffee bar and the first person we saw was the nice chap we had met the previous evening in London. Neither of us had mentioned our trips to Malmo. I have never met this person since. I have no idea if these two stories are of interest to your study but they have stayed at the back of mind and I recalled them recently after watching the TV programme about chance where this web site was mentioned. Graham