Beyond Coincidence (17 page)

T
ILL
D
EATH

Two cars collided at high speed in Paris in 1996 killing both drivers—who turned out to be man and wife. The couple had been separated for some months and neither knew that the other would be out driving that night. Police considered the possibility of it being a bizarre murder-suicide but concluded it was pure coincidence.

T
HE
W
RONG
B
AG

Police in Italy caught a thief after he sped past a woman on his motorcycle and snatched her purse. The woman was his mother, who recognized him and reported him.

C
OLLARED

A thief thought he should look his best when he appeared in court on burglary charges. So he wore his smartest jacket.

But it backfired when the prosecutor assigned to the case, Marc Florens, recognized the jacket as his own, stolen from his home earlier in the year, along with a camera and some cash. Florens retrieved his jacket, but as an “interested party” he had to be replaced by another lawyer before the case could proceed.

D
ON'T
P
LAY
T
HAT
S
ONG TO
M
E

Peter Robertson's neighbor Sarah turned up at his apartment in a distressed state because of intractable problems with her boyfriend. Tactfully, Peter put some gentle music on the CD player to soothe her, but the first note of Van Morrison's “Someone Like You” made Sarah wail. It was her and her boyfriend's special song.

O
UT
-S
WISSED

There was only one soldier in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War who understood Swiss, and it was just the luck of the Swiss prisoners captured fighting for the Union that it was his turn on guard duty the night they plotted their escape. Bev Tucker alerted his comrades after hearing the men whispering in the language of their native canton, where Tucker had gone to school. The unfortunate conspirators faced a circle of bayonets when they tried to make their break from a train en route to a prison camp in Salisbury, Maryland.

S
PANDEX
P
AS DE
D
EUX

A respected businessman and community leader was charged with indecently exposing himself in three Des Moines beauty parlors after being positively identified by beauticians. J. D. Mullen, a former director of the Chamber of Commerce, was said to have entered the Xsalonce, Body Bronze, and Professional Image salons dressed in Spandex leggings, to carry out acts of “bizarre exhibitionism.” The resulting publicity caused Mullen to lose his job and be shunned by neighbors.

Seven months later, however, all charges were dropped when the authorities realized they'd got the wrong man. It had been noticed that Mullen bore an amazing resemblance to Michael Long, known to police as “Spandex Man,” who had been arrested many times for similar behavior. Witnesses agreed that the likeness was uncanny. Mullen said, “It's ripped my family apart. Even though the charges have been dropped, the damage has been done.”

P
OETIC
I
NJUSTICE

It's a humbling enough experience for any writer to find his precious book priced at a few cents on the shelf of a thrift store; worse to find it in the trash container outside a thrift store. No doubt some writers deserve such a comedown but not poet Simon Armitage, who was both humble and courageous enough to relate the tale in the book
Mortification: Writers' Stories of their Public Shame.
Armitage certainly didn't deserve the mortification that was yet to come. Taking the book out of the trash he saw that it was a signed copy. Beside the signature, in his own handwriting, were the words, “To Mum and Dad.”

G
IELGUD'S
G
AFF

The great actor Sir John Gielgud was famous for his gaffs. One night at a Hollywood party he complained loudly about a dinner party he'd attended the night before. “Terrible night,” he said, “with that insufferable George Axlerod. Does anybody know him?” In the awkward silence that followed a man could be heard clearing his throat. “Well … I'm George Axlerod.…”

This begs the question: was George Axlerod's attendance at the second party really a coincidence, or was he sent there by the Devil?

3

FANCY MEETING YOU HERE

It's not just a small world. It's a small world with billions of people in it. At the time of writing this sentence there were, according to the Internet World Population Clock, 6,385,725,918 people living on this planet (assuming you are reading this on Earth). That number will have grown considerably by the time you read this. Little wonder that we keep bumping into each other!

To further understand the nature of these kinds of coincidences we must also factor in the theory of “six points of separation.” First imagine a very, very large field. Into this field we place all the people we know. We then add all the people that those people know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know.

That, according to the theory, would be all the people in the world, including Himalayan hermits and Aborigines on walkabout in the Australian outback. Just try it if you don't believe us.

Maybe the truly surprising thing is that in such a small, densely populated world, amazing chance encounters don't happen more often. Perhaps Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had it right in this comic sketch:

PETER
: Hello.

DUDLEY
: Hello.

PETER
: How are you?

DUDLEY
: I'm terribly well. How are you?

PETER
: I'm terribly well as well.

DUDLEY
: I must say you are looking very fit.

PETER
: I'm feeling pretty fit actually. Isn't it amazing—us just bumping into each other like this?

DUDLEY
: Yes. I mean here of all places.

PETER
: Here of all places! I mean, I haven't seen you since, er …

DUDLEY
: Now, er … hold on a minute … er, when was it? Er … we, we haven't seen each other …

PETER
: Well actually we haven't seen each other.…

DUDLEY
: We haven't seen each other … er … before.

PETER
: That's right. We've never seen each other before, have we?

DUDLEY
: No.

PETER
: You've never seen me.

DUDLEY
: And I've never seen you. What a small world.

PETER
: What a small world!

Here's a selection of extraordinary chance encounters between people who, unlike Pete and Dud, were in fact connected.

F
AR
A
WAY
A
ROUND THE
C
ORNER

Nellie Richardson said good-bye to her brother Joseph in the early 1940s and didn't see him again for more than half a century. Joseph was then a teenager, enlisting in the navy.

Nellie grew old and gave up hope of ever seeing him again, but one day, sitting in her nursing home, she was galvanized by the sight of a seventy-nine-year-old man on the other side of the room. She knew immediately it was Joe.

Perhaps as incredible as the meeting was the fact that their paths had traveled so close to each other but failed to connect for so long. At the time they met, Joe had been living in the nursing home for six months, and for decades before that the brother and sister had been living barely a mile apart in the same city.

Both had a fifty-five-year-old daughter named Sandra.

M
ARCIA AND
P
ETER
M
EET
A
GAIN

Peter and Jean and Paul and Marcia are two couples who lived a couple of miles away from each other and had a mutual friend who had never introduced them. One evening the friend organized a dinner dance for eighty people and as chance would have it, Marcia and Peter were seated next to each other, for all either of them knew, for the first time.

Peter looked at her name card and said, “I'll remember your name because sixty years ago I used to play with a little girl called Marcia in India.”

Marcia said, “And I used to play with a little boy called Peter.”

They had both regained a childhood friend.

H
E
A
IN'T
H
EAVY

You never know who you are going to meet when you hitchhike.

Tim Henderson's parents divorced when he was quite young. His father remarried and had another son, but Tim had never met him. That was until Tim hitched a lift in a car driven by diving engineer Mark Knight. During their long ride they discovered they were brothers.

O B
ROTHER
W
HERE
A
RT
T
HOU
?

We've all had the experience of losing something and then finding it right under our noses. It happened to Rose Davies—with her brother.

Rose was just three months old when she was adopted. Years later she discovered that she had three brothers—Sid, John, and Chris—and set out to trace them.

Rose found Sid first and then John, but she didn't have to look far to find Chris.

Rose, forty-one, was staggered to discover that her long-lost brother was the man who had just moved in across the street.

“I'd only known the family for three months,” said Rose. “But I thought they were very nice.”

Chris, thirty-seven, was equally astonished when Rose told him who she was. He'd been searching for her, too.

H
APPY
F
AMILIES

Martin Plimmer and his wife were close friends with two couples; let's call them Janet and John and Antony and Cleopatra. The three couples had two children each and, come the summer, they would frequently vacation together, either the Plimmers with Janet and John, or the Plimmers with Antony and Cleopatra; sometimes all three couples would go together and the children would hit each other with plastic buckets.

This happy state of affairs changed overnight when Antony and Cleopatra split up. Antony left home and Rudolpho moved in with Cleopatra. The friendship dynamic teetered and swayed. The fundamental problem was that Janet didn't like Rudolpho. Rudolpho, in turn, didn't think much of Janet. At their first and only social meeting Janet and Rudolpho quickly got into an argument that flared into an exchange of insults and, in the next few weeks, matured into an enduring hard-boiled resentment. What's more, Cleopatra resented Janet for not liking her new love Rudolpho, and Janet resented Cleopatra for taking his side.

This chopped a third off the vacation group potential. It was generally agreed that the only thing to do was for the Plimmers to go on vacation this year with Janet and John, leaving Cleopatra and Rudolpho to explore their new-found love alone.

All this brou haha meant that booking had been put off to the last minute, and the vacation dates loomed. The Plimmers and Janet and John decided to look for a house to rent in Provence. Cleopatra and Rudolpho, working independently, decided to look for a house to rent in Provence. The Plimmers and Janet and John found a sunny house in a sleepy little village called St. Antonin du Var. Cleopatra and Rudolpho, working independently, found a sunny house in a sleepy little village called Pontevès. Then the landlord rang to apologize. He had double-booked the house, but he had another property he could let them have slightly cheaper at St. Antonin du Var, where in the course of their vacation, they all bumped into each other.

S
NAP

It's odd to make friends with someone and then realize in retrospect that you've seen them before when you neither “saw” them nor knew who they were. It's odder still to have taken a photograph of them.

Graham Freer's hobby is taking and processing photographs. One of many he has taken is a shot of people in the town hall square. This particular picture was notable at the time of development only in that it was the one he chose at random to enlarge a section to test the quality of his enlarger's lens. Years later he made friends with a girl and the next time he revisited his old photographs, the previously indifferent test photo had become personal and poignant. The picture hadn't changed, but the photographer had and so had one of those distantly uninvolved girls in the square. She was his new friend.

B
LOWIN' IN THE
W
IND

A plumber's wife had a rare visitor on the doorstep of her house in Crouch End, a quiet residential suburb of North London. It was Bob Dylan.

“Is Dave in?” he asked.

The plumber's wife explained that her husband Dave had popped out but would be back shortly. If he would like to come in and wait she'd make him a cup of tea.

The tale of Bob Dylan's unexpected call at the wrong house in Crouch End, with its delicious expectation of Dave the plumber returning a few minutes later to find the singing legend sitting in his living room drinking tea, has entered local folklore. Normally it is told and received with the kind of skeptical awe reserved for urban myths. But the story is true.

Dylan had been interested in working with the English producer Dave Stewart, founder of the Eurythmics, who has a studio in Crouch Hill. Dylan had decided to pay him a visit, but with so many road names in the area starting with the word “Crouch,” he'd ended up knock-knock-knocking on the right number door in the wrong street.

4

LOST AND FOUND

A backpacker tells the story of losing a contact lens while bathing under a waterfall on the lower slopes of a mountain in Peru. Three days later she was washing her underwear in the river further downstream when she saw something glinting on a rock by the water's edge. It was her missing contact lens. Too amazing to be true? Possibly. But the fact remains that if something
can
happen it will, given enough time. So if you lose your contact lens in a mountain waterfall, don't give up hope. Just be patient.