A long shot

25 years ago I was still living in Germany and placed a search for partner advert in a German weekly paper. One of the responses came from a German who lived and worked south of London. We met a couple of times, and kept in touch for a while after that, so I knew A had moved to London, but that was that. A year later I had my first ever trip to London, but decided not to contact A. I queued for tickets for CATS. I was 6th in the queue, 4 tickets were returned, but number 4 and 5 in the queue were two Swedish girls, who did not take up the ticket, and I got it. It was for a seat next to #3 in the queue, a guy from Australia. In the break we started to chat and it turned out he was in London for a congress on emergency medicine, and earlier the same day had been given a guided tour of A's department by A. The guy was planning to send A a thank you note on his return to Australia; so A would learn from a letter in Australia that I had been in London. A few years ago I heard A's name again from one of my oldest friends in Germany: her daughter and A's daughter were horse riding in the same group of youngsters. PS: I showed this to my husband before sending it off. It turned out that when I called him he had just been busy on his laptop using Winbugs - and Prof David Spiegelhalter is the main author for the Winbugs manual!