Coincidences of the Third Kind

Here is a series of related coincidences connecting ten people over four decades and half of England. I am John from Lytham St. Anne’s who went to school with Frank and Steve 1968-75, then shared Liverpool University digs from 1975-77 with Ged from Newcastle. In 1976, travelling to the NUS Motorcycle Rally in Cambridge, I over-nighted in Leicester University Halls. I spoke briefly to a random student while we waited for a kettle to boil in a communal kitchen of the grim sort often created by 18-23 year-old male undergrad’s. Turns out the ‘randomer’ knows Ged as the paper boy who lived two streets away from him in Newcastle! By 1981 I’m working in London. Dawn, a kind and gorgeous Halifax lass, and Nige a kind.....of junior Bruce Springsteen, move into the flat above mine. Nige, it transpired, was not only from Lytham St. Anne’s, but had worked a hotel summer job there with Frank and Steve, my old school mates! Around this time I also met Dawn’s younger brother, Pete, for about 15 minutes......... In 1984 Ged, and his pal Simon, stayed with me in London whist attending a Neil Young concert. Turns out Simon and my neighbour Dawn are pals having studied the same course together at Sheffield University! Owing to holiday photos ‘too exiting’ for general release, I was not shown Dawn and Nige’s photo album. Had I been shown, I would have been astonished to find it included several pictures of Simon and Ged at Dawn’s parties in Sheffield. By 1996, I am now working in Manchester. Speculatively, in view of the foregoing series of connected lives (and with the caveat that I realised it was probably a daft question) I asked a new colleague from Halifax whether he ever knew a Dawn who used to live there. My colleague was friends with and in the same class as the aforementioned Pete - and remembered being ‘quite taken’ with Dawn! “Do you know ‘whatsername’?” “No, but I probably know someone who does”.