A sense of something strange

In the late 1980s The Observer newspaper asked people to send in their coincidence stories. These stories were then collected and published. I read an article about the book and, though interested in the subject, I didn't make a note of the title. Over the next few years I tried in vain to find this book. I never found it. In 1991 I was working for the Edinburgh Science Festival. One of my tasks was to drive someone around Glasgow. My boss sent me off to buy a map of Glasgow. I walked to the nearest bookshop and, on my way to the map section, stopped at a trolley stacked with discounted books. I spotted a book about the occult / unknown and had a look to see if my elusive book on coincidences was mentioned in the bibliography. It wasn’t, but the bibliography did contain a book called “A sense of Something Strange” by someone called Archie E. Roy. It looked interesting so I made a note of the details, bought my map of Glasgow and headed back to the Science Festival office. When I got back to the office my boss was on the phone. The conversation seemed to be drawing to a close. “O.K. Archie…….thanks…yeah….. Goodbye.” said my boss to the person on the other end of the phone. “Who was that?”I asked. “Oh, that was Archie Roy, he’s giving a talk in the festival next week.” My boss had just been speaking to the man whose name I had scribbled into my notebook five minutes previously. I didn’t manage to go to the talk and never met him but a few years ago I did e –mail the story to one of his colleagues. In a post script to the above, my Mum recently got me a copy of “A sense of Something Strange” from Amazon. It was signed by the author. In a final post script to the above, I recently tracked down copy of the original book I was looking for on the Internet. It’s called “Coincidence: A matter of Chance or Synchronicity” by Brian Inglis.