Meeting My Rival

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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When I was 9, my friend David Hume and I would mess around together. He lived around the corner, but we went to different schools - he went to a place called Haberdashers. But no matter what David and I did together, he would always tell me that he had done something much braver, or more exciting, or more fun, with his friend at school, PJ Collins. So I hated PJ Collins. Fifteen years later, while on holiday in a remote hostel on a beach on the east coast of the island of Zanzibar off the coast of Tanzania, I met a young man, my age, who said he'd gone to Haberdashers school, and I told him which school I had gone to. He then told me his name was Phillip, but people called him PJ. I stared at him, and said "Are you PJ Collins?" He stared back at me. "Are you Olly Lambert?" It turned out that for years, our mutual friend David had told PJ no matter what they did together, he did things that were much braver, more exciting and more fun with his other friend, Olly.
Total votes: 331
Date submitted:Sat, 14 Jan 2012 12:18:32 +0000Coincidence ID:3986

Comments

Tequila Dave

Tue, 19/12/2017 - 10:01pm

Hi guys, Guess who this is....? :-) I was never trying to put each other of you down or spur you on to greater heights, although maybe I did on the odd occasion! I was just sharing what good times I had with the other best friend I had at the time. You're allowed more than one, yes? At the time I had different sets of friends: school, choir, grafitti, boy racer etc and I had to keep some of them separate from the others, but the two of you did cross the Venn diagram for several of them and I see you both equally as proper friends and we all shared good times we will never forget. Just thinking back now...the stories that come to mind are great and I still talk about them now, even to random people in a pub! I grew up with both of you as friends and in a way that has helped turn me into who I am today, which isn't a bad thing :-) (PS Olly, you should have said something at the time! :-) )