Cambridge Coincidences Collection

Well I Never!

Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University wants to know about your coincidences!

Ticket birth date

For my father's 70th birthday my brother-in-law bought three tickets to watch England play cricket at Lords, three generations, my father, himself and his son were to go together. At random he put one ticket inside his birthday card. My farter noticed his tictet was 1517, he was born on 1st May 1917, his birth date was 1.5.17.

Radio coincidence

I listen to Radio 4 (speech radio) all day most of the time. The number of times that I hear the same word as I’m typing (or saying or reading) is so astonishing that I started to note them until the list got too long and time consuming to keep up. These words aren’t common conjunctions or anything, they are often not the sort of word you’d expect to come across in an average day let alone at the same moment, sometimes several times a day.

Small world

I was in South Africa researching the possibility of my company promoting an ice-skating show in the country. There hadn't been an ice-show there for more than 20 years. Apartheid had just ended and it seemed the right time to bring a show to the country. Travelling on a small plane (12 seats) I was in conversation with the man sitting next to me and after about 20 minutes, it turned out that he was an ice-engineer who worked on the ice-shows some 20 years previously. He was also very close friends with the female promoter who I had wanted to track down to discuss the subject.

Traveling to France

Last Summer we set off to France for a camping holiday. While on the boat I bumped into a man who works for a friend, Bob. I said hello and went on my merry way. The next morning as we were queueing on the boat to get onto the car deck, Bob and his partner were behind us on the stairs. We headed off across France towards the camp site. My daughters were getting restless so we decided to stop in motorway service station. After a bite to eat I went to use the gents.

mutual relatives

A new boy joined my son's class (in Buckinghamshire). He became friends with my son and I discovered that his mother's paternal uncle was married to my paternal aunt so we had mutual first cousins, though unrelated. The mother had been brought up in Ireland, I had been brought up in Zimbabwe.

Meeting a freined abroad

Some years ago I was in Sydney, and wanting to walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I was searching for the way to get up onto the bridge walkway. Just below the bridge was a large shop/souvenir store, so I went in to ask directions. There were alot of people in there, so I searched around to find someone to ask the question of. I ended up going to one of the counters and started to ask the girl for directions, when, halfway through my question, I noticed her looking at me oddly. Are you ... by any chance... Jamie D W, she asked?

coincidence of radio and singing

My sister turned off the radio, which was playing an opera, and my mother objected that she was listening to it. My sister said she didn't want to listen to... and then say three notes in a mocking high falsetto. When my mother turned the radio back on, the singer say exactly the same notes in the same rhythm.

Mutual friend identified

My brother-in-law was on a very small commuter plane in Maine when the young woman next to him said (in a Southern US accent) that she had had a professor in England whose accent was just like his. He responded as follows: 'You are a graduate of Randolph-Macon Woman's College and you spent your junior year in Reading, England where you took a course in British Politics from Alan Alexander'. He responded to her look of astonishment by telling her he was psychic!

Dancing Match

We were having dinner on a cruise boat in Amsterdam with a Danish colleague. The band played ballroom music and our friend told us he was a former ballroom dance world champion. Our ballroom teachers were also former champions and we discovered that they knew each other from their touring days.

Shared phone numbers

1 The phone number (excluding area codes applied over time) of my parents in Australia in the '70s was the same as that of my wife's parents in the UK at the same time. 2 I went into a barber's in my old home town in Australia (Castelmaine, Victoria) about 10 years ago for a haircut. We got talking about where I live in the UK (Bristol) and it transpired that his brother ran a local barbers just down the road from my house.

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