So, for years I’ve heard about coincidences - we all have - from big ones involving Heads of State and/or natural disasters to more personal anecdontes. You know the kind of thing: a relative of my friend blah was travelling on a train through [insert country here] when the train struck a cow on the track and it later transpired that my friend’s relative was called Bessie and so was the wife of the farmer who owned the cow. Spooky, eh?!
Er, no, not really.
So while I can’t promise any tales of the paranormal, something happened to me that was definitely unexpected.
I was in Hamburg for a day and a night last week. We arrived mid evening, then headed out to dinner, then spent the whole of the next day at a meeting. We were supposed be coming back on a late flight, but the meeting wrapped up a little early, so we managed to transfer onto an earlier one. Sweet.
So we headed over to the airport, and then got in line to check in. C and I were chuntering away (about nothing, as usual) when suddenly, the woman ahead of us in the queue turned around and said “Meg?”
I looked at her - my age-ish but dressed like a businesswoman in heels and a neat skirt (as opposed to me, looking like a total mess in jeans and trainers and a jumper, having been involved in a long long casual offsite) - and nothing registered.
And then she said “It’s J_______” and the penny dropped.
We lived together in the first year of university, and were as close as friends could be. We travelled all over Eastern Europe together and kept the friendship going over years and diverse locations (me: Spain, then South America, her: France then Germany, then Liverpool). I danced at her wedding in 1997 (and then slept under a tablecloth in the marquee because I couldn’t get a cab back to the hotel) and we finally both settled at opposite ends of London as the millennium drew to a close.
Working for an airline, I last saw her when she was plotting her next career move, and we sat together in a cafe in Olympia rejigging her CV on my lunchbreak. That was 1999, and somewhere between then and, well, now, we lost touch. I googled her a few times but nothing came up. The link was broken.
And then suddenly, there she was, standing in front of me in an airport neither of us use regularly (notwithstanding the fact that I’m off there again tomorrow), standing in the same line, checking into a flight neither of us were supposed to be on. In fact, she now lives on the other side of the world, and this was her first trip back for several years - and she was only in Hamburg because she had attended a wedding at the weekend, and had stayed on an extra day. The wedding, it transpired, was of someone who until recently worked for the company I’d met with that day.
Weird how these things happen.
Do you have (or know of) any strange coincidences?
Strangest one I know of involved my parents, and goes as follows…
They travelled from Oxfordshire to Finland to see my brother, who was working there at the time. Having been out for a walk, they stopped and sat on a bench, just talking about what to do next.
An Indian guy on the next bench heard them speaking English, came over, and asked them where in England they were from. They told him, and he said that he knew only one person in Oxfordshire, which was a Dr B**** , who had a practice there.
Turns out that Dr B**** is my father’s doctor, and he then asked my father to pass on a message - which he did.
So - couple from Oxfordshire meet Indian (as in “guy from India, also visiting Finland”) in Finland, and they both know the same person, who lives in the same town.
I met my neighbours at the Montreal airport yesterday - very bizarre!