The Coincidence of Coincidences

This morning (24th January 2012) I read an email sent to me a few days ago by my friend and fellow performance artist, Brian Popay, directing me to a website that he thought I might like, entitled Understanding Uncertainty. I duly discovered that it concerned the Cambridge Coincidences Collection masterminded by one Professor David Spiegelhalter. Having read some of the quoted examples, I replied to Brian’s email, expressing regret that I hadn’t kept a log of the several coincidences I’d experienced in my lifetime because, off the top of my head, I couldn’t recall any of them and was therefore unable to contribute to Professor Spiegelhalter’s pool of stories. However… Later today, during a bus journey, I spotted an abandoned copy of ‘i’, a morning newspaper that I haven’t read since I bought the first edition way back in October 2010. I picked it up partly because this very morning I’d been discussing with my wife differences in the content and style of British morning newspapers – so here was an example to hand that would be useful for furthering our discussion. Lo and behold, what should I come across in ‘i’ but an article entitled ‘Coincidence: what are the chances of it happening?’ To my surprise, it concerned Professor Spiegelhalter’s collection of coincidences. What’s more… The ‘I’ is owned by Evgeny Lebedev, the newspaper magnate who also controls the Independent (of which ‘I’ is a cheaper spin-off) and the Evening Standard. In this morning’s email to Brian, I also happened to mentioned that a few days ago I’d played a supporting volunteer role in a show called You Me Bum Bum Train, which processes paying audience members, one at a time, through a succession of highly contrasting colourful situations. On the night I took part, one of those bewildered customers was… Evgeny Lebedev. I’m therefore pleased to be able to submit this story to your survey, and humbly suggest that it may qualify as a rare type of coincidence not yet catalogued by Professor S – the MultiMetacoincidence, or coincidence about coincidence, which itself incorporates sub-coincidences.