There’s a video to go with this that I’ll add in later when I’ve uploaded it, but here’s the story:
On Thursday, heading up to Unconvention in Manchester, I had a bit of a nightmare journey. I got to Euston OK, only to find that all trains out of there heading north were cancelled thanks to a derailed train.
We were all told to go to St Pancras for northbound trains, and change at Nottingham for Manchester.
I got there, got on the nearly-full train, and said to a bloke sat next to an empty seat ‘can I sit there?’
‘you’re a bass player, aren’t you?‘ he said, followed by, ‘I was on your website yesterday, I was going to email you about getting some lessons’.
What are, as the expression goes, the chances of that? He now has some lessons booked in, not surprisingly, and we had a most enjoyable hour chatting on the train.
So go on, what are your favourite serendipitous coincidences? (I’ll add the video of this encounter later – as soon as it happened, I grabbed my camera and filmed it 😉 )
When I was pregnant with my daughter I started going to a church in London. I hadn’t been to church since I was 15 – and I’d been brought up a Methodist and the church I found myself in was extremely “High Church” Anglican. I was pretty much on my own, very young, and didn’t know anyone who had children or was pregnant. I’d been going for a little while when my mother came to visit from the USA, she’s a Methodist preacher but came along with me to my ‘bells and smells’ church and during the service became convinced she knew the couple a few pews in front of us. However, as she had known them at a church in Washington in the NE of England, when I was 7 years old, and they most definitely weren’t High Church this seemed very unlikely.
Amazingly it turned out that this couple were my mother’s friends from Washington, they hadn’t recognized me as they hadn’t seen me for 14 years, and I was still new and quite shy to talk to people in the church. In the months that followed they became an incredible source of support to me and to my daughter and became her godparents.
It’s a long story, but that never stopped me:-)
I always knew I was adopted, and when I searched and discovered my mother’s name was Jones and she was welsh, I kind of gave up 🙂 , though I left a note on file saying I was willing to be contacted.
Anyhows, around the time of my wedding anniversary, Sian and I went to stay at Ruthin Castle in Mold. On return I had a letter form a social worker saying that they had been approached by someone who believed they were a family member. To cut a long story short (in the words of the song), it was my birth father, who lived in a small village about 2 miles from where we had been staying. Further, we both programme, we both love de Bono and his thinking skillsapproach, he and I are are the only people I know that have designed software for the purpose of provoking and managing creative ideas, we answer the phone with the same tonality (despite the fact he has a welsh accent and I don’t)…
Well, there’s the Unconvention family coincidence story itself, of course:
http://andrewdubber.com/2008/10/07/small-world/
I love that story! I don’t think I’ve accidentally bumped into anyone I’m related to, but quite often meet friends of friends in far flung places. At Tuttle a couple of months ago, I was talking about being in LA, and one friend there said ‘I know a singer/songwriter who moved to the States, to Southern California’ …”Jason Feddy?” I interrupted… indeed, ’twas him. I just knew. 🙂