Emma

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time with the family of the actor Paul Bettany, whose father was our drama teacher at school, but after A levels Paul and I lost touch. One day I bumped into him at Waterloo and we exchanged phone numbers but I lost the bit of paper with the number on. About a year later, I visited a school friend in Norfolk for her first baby's christening, I had never been there before. I arranged to meet up with a couple of other school freinds at a coastal town in Norfolk following the christening, I had never been to the town before. I went to the meeting, but my friends were very late so we didn't meet up. They went for a walk along the beach and bumped into Paul who was coincidently in Norfolk filming. None of these people had been to the town before. My friends explained to him that I had lost his number and took it again. Two days later, back in London, my brother, then manager of a restaurant, was clearing up at the end of the evening when he found on the floor Paul's driving liscence and passport which he had dropped when eating there. There were no other details about how to contact Paul, but, of course, just two days before in Norfolk, he had given his phone number to my friends to give to me, so documents and friendships were all reunited at once. I spent some time at boarding school when my parents were living abroad. One of my school friends' families became like a surrogate family and I spent a lot of time living at their house in Tuffnel Park, which the parents had bought in a bad state of repair in the sixties and slowly done up. Years later in my third year at University, I became very close friends with a first year undergraduate who was a mature student. Several months into the friendship, conversation moved to places we had lived and my friend described the first flat that she had shared with her husband which was in a terrible state in Tuffnel Park - it was the self same house which my surrogate parents had bought in the sixties. Last summer we were visiting my mum in Deal in Kent. My eldest daughter, then eleven, spent a lot of time fretting about a "date" (her first) which she was setting up via facebook with a boy from the primary school in Greenwich she had attended. On the last day of the visit, my son's birthday, we took the children for a treat to Dover Castle. As we rounded the tower, my eldest went white. She had walked slap bang into the boy in question who was, by coincidence, on a visit from Greenwich for the day. At the age of four, we went on a family holiday to Cornwall and stayed in a small cottage by the sea. One day we were out and Dad asked if we wanted to go out for tea or go back to the cottage. I spoke up from the back of the car to say we couldn't go home because "Calamantha and the sea lawyer were there having a chat." We went out for tea. A few months later, Dad was looking at an ordanance survey map of the place we had visited and discovered that the area behind the cottage was sometimes known as the Calamanthac Woods after some ancient woodland which had been there. We had not heard this before. I do not know what a sea lawyer is or if they exist, but I have spent 15 years in maritime and freight journalism so perhaps that was just a lucky omen.