Margaret Munyard

This series of coincidences involving me and members of my family and a seemingly unconnected other family. They began in 1987 when a mutual friend asked if I could offer my spare room to a new work colleague for a few weeks. (I shall call her K). K was relocating from London to the north of England but the conveyancing on the house she was buying was delayed and her start date at work began before she had a home. I said yes and on the agreed day K duly arrived at my house apologising for her late arrival as she'd had to drop off a friend in Nottingham en route from London. As I'd lived for several years in Nottingham I pursued the conversation and we discovered that the man she gave a lift to was someone I knew from work and as such shared some social times with over a period of 5 or 6 years. Not only that but we worked out that when K had come to Nottingham for a weekend to see her friend, we'd probably been in the same pub in the same group of friends/work colleagues although we didn't remember actually meeting each other. But we discovered that we knew many of the same people. It goes on. After a week or so K's husband, still in London, asks K what was my surname. "No!" he exclaimed....when K told him, "I travelled round the Yemen in a Landrover with her brother 10 years ago". It was delightful to find these overlaps. And on: some 5 or 6 years ago I'm having supper with (the same) K and her husband and we are chatting about his work trip to London. "Something really odd happened to me last night" he said. So he tells the story of going out to eat after the work meeting with some of the people who he'd been with all day. He ended up sitting next to a woman who while chatting, he told me, continually reminded him of me and he couldn't work out why so decided to ask her where she was born thinking this would complete the connection he felt there must be. He knew a lot about my family as by then I'd been close friends with his family for over 20 years and we'd spent many Christmases with the brother who'd been in the Yemen with him as well as other of my family members. When the woman told him where she was born he was a bit baffled as the place she named didn't quite register with him as the place in which he knew I was born and brought up. He went away quite puzzled but in the telling of the story to me and my asking relevant questions it became obvious that he had spent some time in the company of my (estranged) sister! Someone he'd never met but knew about. And just to add he has never 'bumped' into my only other younger sibling. I have another co-incidence involving the same (Yemen) brother. I've decided to attend a meditation weekend in a tiny village in the Yorkshire Dales about 40 miles from where I was living. I arrive and settle myself in the main congregating area alongside another woman. We introduce ourselves and I ask how far she's travelled to attend the weekend. She tells me she's come from Southern Spain but had a daughter who lived in a village nearby and she combined her family visit with the meditation weekend. So having an interest in Southern Spain I asked her whereabouts she lived. She told me and it was the same small town where my (the same brother as above) brother is having a house built. I ask more questions and it turns out she was married to the architect who was designing the house my brother was having built and knew him very well!