[Closed] Freak occurrences; what are the odds?

I used to see a band called The Otherside.

They did a cover of a song by Fire called My Father's Name Is Dad.

When in Australia in 1989 I managed to find an album with the original song on it. A very obscure song that I'd not managed to find in London.

Being pleased with my purchase I took it to my friend's house  to play it.

A bit later another person turned up who happened to be Mick Blood from The LIme Spiders.

He had just been at the rehearsal rooms learning Father's Name Is Dead. Jaws well and truly dropped.

He always dedicated the song to me when they did it live.

Picked a hitchhiker up on Edinburgh bypass. Old friend from my Uni days, he's now living in Oxford, I was going right passed Oxford. We had both left Aviemore that morning.

(He had been climbing and camping for ten days with no shower and smelt a lot)

I unexpectedly met my next-door-neighbours in Buxton, nothing too weird there you might think, but we lived in London.

About 20 years ago we met a family from Sheffield whilst on holiday in Cyprus, had a few drinks in the bar together but never exchanged contact details or discussed future holiday plans (in fact we hadn't even made any plans). That christmas on holiday in scotland we bumped into the same family.

Watching a six nations match in my local in San Sebastian, Spain a couple of months ago. Some tourists come in, parents and adult son, it's packed but there's space at my tables so I invite them to sit down. We get chatting, they're from Edinburgh but I detect a familiar accent on the dad, turns out he's from my (very small) home town but moved away in the 80s, having grown up in the next street to mine. Then we find out he worked with my dad at (insert name of pharmaceutical plant). Freaked him out a bit when I showed him a photo of my son & nephew standing in the street in front of his childhood home, taken last summer as there was a vintage car parked outside.

It got even weirder when I asked where they were staying. The flat next to ours, same landing, is an AirBnB. You guessed it...

While in Ibiza I was trying to track down a record shop I bumped into an old school friend that was in the navy.

We used to live in a flat above a hairdressers shop, knew the owner well and wasn’t surprised as she once text us whilst we were away at a festival to say she’d lost her keys to the flat and needed to get in to the shared fuse box and had to get the locks changed. No worries we’ll pick new keys up Monday afternoon when we get home.

Fast forwards to us leaving late Sunday night due to one of the group who was driving having chronic toothache, we get dropped off outside the flat about 3 in the morning and pop the key in the door and remember the text. Shite!

Options are expensive taxi to the folks house or an awkward call to our landlady. Paper, Scissors, Stone and it’s my other half making the call.

At that moment I randomly put my works key in the lock. Click. Open door. WTF?

RM.

Oh, and when I told the story to a mate here, she had a good one too. Back in the 80s at school she and her mates used to make little stickers and sell them at the town fiestas to raise money. Fast forward thirty years and she's working in Amsterdam and lodging with a family. The father lends her a Dutch/Spanish dictionary he'd used when travelling in Spain years ago. One of her stickers was on the back of it...

In a coffee shop in Amsterdam with a group of Uni mates,. Through the smoke we're speculating about the really fit looking girl on the other side of the bar and how much she looked like Sally who everyone used to fancy when we were at Uni - or at least what we imagined Sally would look like 6 years after Uni.

Then she came over. Yep, it was Sally.

I was talking to a friend of a friend one evening - a woman thats maybe half a generation older than me. We were in the north of scotland but she was originally from Kent.

Throughout the evening during various anecdotes about past exploits and shenanigans it turned out she'd gone to the same school in Kent as my dad had - she didn't say as much had but I sort of figured it out what school it was even though she hadn't said what town it was in (I'm named after the school, by coincidence rather than design I think), its just that she went there about 10 years after he'd left.

Even though I've hardly ever visited the place I was able to name her teachers, name the school, name the street she grew up in, name her neighbours, name the family that owned the bakers on the corner, the cobbler with one leg,  - all weird bits of trivia-  without having met any of those people or been to any of those places, just because they'd cropped up in various tales my dad had told me over the years.

That was pretty weird, but it turns out most of her career had sort of followed in my dads footsteps - in Kent, in London, in Birmingham, in Cheshire, Merseyside and Manchester - she'd be educated in the same colleges, would even have been taught by him on her post grad if she'd arrived a year earlier, and taught in several of the same schools colleges in the same departments.  And in all those places I could name people that she knew but that I'd never met - they were just names on Christmas cards to me.

My father and I were helping with a tombola at the village fate. Opened the barrel to put all the tickets in and there was one ticket stuck at the bottom of the barrel from the year before. I fetched it out and it was mine.

My parents were living in rural India, just outside Bangalore. My mother had just had a recommendation that she returns home to UK as she had a lump on her knee, that may not be good news as a sarcoma cancer. They went to visit friends in the city to say they were leaving for a second medical opinion and tests in UK. At the friends house were a couple, whose were friends of friends, of thier friends, whose plane had been redirected and them dumped in the city for 24hrs. One of the visitors was the leading UK sarcoma specialist - who was happy to take my mum direct for a consultation...

I kept meeting the same people on little crazy spots around the world, rubbish tips by the sea, strange unpopular beaches, weird salt flats  in the Sahara, strange reefs in the Red Sea. Very wrong immigration detention rooms in airports. Then I remembered we all had common interests. Not too surprising,

We met a couple whilst on honeymoon in Kenya in 1994, we met the same couple in 2004 staying in the same hotel as us in Gran Canaria, and like us they now had 2 young sons.....mind blown 😀

I stepped back at a road crossing in New York many years ago and stood on the foot of someone. Turned round and it was an ex Uni flat mate who I had lost touch with.

My boss was travelling in India in the 70s. Was in a boat crossing the Ganges, small boat passes going the other way. On it is his neighbour from Wellington, NZ. Neither knew each was in India.

On August17 1978 ,a friend and I were indoors playing Darts, it was pouring down outside.

We put the telly on, (for top of the pops obvs) and this came on...makes you think!

Love these stories

Summer of ‘89, I was in what was then (I think) called the DSS Office in Ealing filling out forms to get an NI number for a summer of working in London.

I was sat at a table with another lad filling out the same form, got chatting and talking over the form - he was Irish as well and I could see that his surname was Darcy! We had a good giggle over that...”what are the chances” etc.

Then the lady behind the glass screen called out “Darcy” and we both sort of hesitantly stood up wondering which one she called out for, only to be beaten to the counter by a third Darcy in the room. 😀

Can’t remember now how many people were waiting there but certainly no more than a couple of dozen or so.

Got pulled over by police (tail light out). Officer was my ex oppo from my first submarine in Royal Navy. Even stranger he was from down south ( this was in north east) he’d meet a girl from Newcastle and left Navy to join Northumbria police. Two weeks later bumped into him again in town centre when he was off duty. Haven’t seen him again in the last 20years!

My boss and I were just chatting one day and it turns out his wife went to the same school in Hong Kong that my wife’s auntie and uncle went to. Small coincidence, but further discussion turned up the fact that his wife’s father was one of the engineers on the monorail that my wife’s grandfather helped design.

Painting the nursery for our 1st born a few years ago, had the iPod on on shuffle.

My dad had died a few years before but he'd always wanted a grandaughter and we'd found out, that day, that we were having a girl and, whilst painting, though how much dad would have loved that...

Next 3 songs after that thought were Annie's Song (one of dad's fave's), American Trilogy (which was playing when he was being cremated) and Johnny Cash's version of 'Hurt' which I'd played a lot on the days following his death..

1988 myslef and 4 friends went Inter-rail though Europe for a month (we were 17-18 at the time).  On an over night train from Paris to Venice, we woke to find we had eaten and drank all our supplies.  I lost th bet and had to go and check the rest of the extremelye long train for a buffet car.  As i walked the train loking for food I passed a group of guys dressed in Scout uniform, one of them had a St Andrew's flag on the sleeve.  I made a metal note to pop my head in and say Hello on the way back.  Turns out there wasnt a buffet car - thirsty and hungry now.  When i got back to the Scouts I opned the door to thier carriage and said Excuse me lads - my Geography teacher turned round and said Hello paul, how are you.

I went back to my mates to explain no buffet car but I had met Mr Barr and they would give us breakfast.  It took me a good 10 minutes to convince my mates it wasnt a wind up.

I went back to my mates to explain no buffet car but I had met Mr Barr and they would give us breakfast.  It took me a good 10 minutes to convince my mates it wasnt a wind up.

<div>:lol: Brilliant.</div>

I was on a family holiday as a nipper up in Shropshire. We're in a shopping centre and my Dad walks past a woman, only to stop and stare. Said woman also stops and stares. "Hello Jenny' says my Dad; 'Hi Rowan' says my great aunt, from Monterey in California.

Similarly, sitting in Stuart's Bar, a fantastic little spot in Grenada. I'd been working out there as a MTB guide for a few months. Just across the bay was the US uni St. George's vet and medical school and I knew Jo, one of the English girls that worked there. This particular evening Jo comes in with a friend. I stare at friend, she stares at me. 'You're Helen' I say; 'yes' she says, 'and you're Neil'. I used to club swim with her in Essex and her Mum worked with my Mum at the local village hospital.

On holiday in Italy, got talking to a retired couple from Derbyshire whilst waiting for a bus. When we told them we had just moved from Bristol they said, that their daughter had too. We're now in Cambridgeshire, that's funny she is in Ely, really, so are we!

They live on Wensum Way, wow, so do our close friends. I'll text to see if they know them, the reply came back saying Yes, and we're at their house now for a birthday party!

In 1990 I went InterRailing around Europe. Before I went I told a girl in the local shop what I was doing and she said it was so exciting and she might do it too.

So, a few months later I was stood in a bus station in Zurich and guess who I saw stood waiting for another bus! Anyway, we had a quick chat then went our separate ways. A couple of weeks later I was sat in a water taxi in Venice and she walked on to the same taxi! We ended up spending the evening together and made loose arrangements to meet back up later on in Greece. Of course now we made plans it never happened and I haven't seen her again.

About six years ago in Budapest I nearly walked straight into a lad I’d played cricket with a few years earlier as he was exiting the subway by the opera house. As if that wasn’t odd enough given we were both originally from the uk, he’d chosen that one weekend to visit with there his Mrs, and I had just two nights there for a site visit on the end of a trip all the way from oz (where I was living at the time). Understandably we rearranged our plans to have beers together that evening.

when I was a kid, i had a silver dogtag on a chain around my neck, as did all other Danish kids at the time. One day in third grade I was playing footie on the gravel football pitch we had at school and lost the chain and tag. I looked for it for days, but no luck... We had a lost and found cupbord, but it never turned up there, either.

Then one summer day in the seventh grade I, noticed something shiny on the gound whilst kicking a few balls around. I picked it up, and it was my old dog tag. Scratced so the name was almost gone, but definetely my name and telephone number!

seeing as no one has actually answered the OP's thread title.

odds of flicking a stone from a brushcutter? pretty high. 1 in 2 maybe?

odds of it firing towards your face? less so but still pretty high, or you wouldnt be wearing a face guard , 1 in 10 maybe?

odds of it finding the gap under your face mask? medium, maybe 1 in 100

odds of it lodging in your node? low, maybe 1 in 1000?

so compound them.

0.5*0.1*0.01*0.0001 = 0.0000005

1:2 million chance of it happening.

I know a guy called Guy. When I say ‘know’- I met him a few times in 1997. But we haven’t met or spoken since.

Being a freelancer I’m constantly working with a different bunch of people. Every few months one of them will say “Guy says ‘hello’”. And every once in a while I get to send messages back via other third party’s too. Most recently when I realised I was talking to his wife.

2001 and I’m working in an Internet Cafe in Sydney during a backpacking trip. Lad walks in to use one of the machines, got to chatting and mentioned similar accents etc, turns out this guy Gavin lived a few hundred metres from me back home, but despite being about the same age, and having a few mutual friends we’d never met, he’d gone to one school in our town and I the other. We chatted for a bit, he did his thing online and left.

About 2 weeks later and my mate is working in this tiny little ghost town north of Melbourne knocking down houses when another backpacker walks into the office looking for a job, Gavin, they worked together for a few weeks and then he left.

17 years later and never, not once have I clapped eyes on him since, but apparently he’s still about.

Non of these these anecdotes are really in keeping with the pebble up the nose thing 🙂

The odds of a [u]specific[/u] freak occurrence happening might be astronomical, but then again the number of all possible freak occurrences must be nigh on infinite. What would be the odds of  highly unlikely, non-specific freak occurrences not happening on a regular basis be?

The random creation of DNA is, apparently, pretty freakish.

While we were crossing Scandinavia on our tandem, we made a stop at the Sami town of Kautokeino in Norway. It’s home to about 3,000 people, way up on the Finmark Plateau.  We stayed on a campsite where the owner had erected a Lavvu for the use of guests, and every night he and the guests would sit around the campfire in the Lavvu drinking Sami coffee and sitting on reindeer hides.

One of the people we met there was a Dutchman called Franz, who now lived in Sweden. He was travelling south by bus and we arranged to meet him a few days later just over the Swedish border, which we did.

Then we went our separate ways.

Two years later we took the same tandem on the Coast and Castles ride. We arrived at the Youth Hostel in Edinburgh, and who should walk in ten minutes later but Franz.

That did my bonce in.

When my daughter was three she had to have a piece of sweetcorn removed from a nostril at the local HNS walk in centre.

Apparently it fell of her fork and went up her nose.

I'm not saying it was aliens...

1995 whilst part way through my undergrad in Kent I met a guy on the same course as some of my friends. he was from the FoD. being a Malverner and a regular biker to the FoD we exchanged stories about FoD living etc. He then told me he'd met a mountainbiker from Malvern years ago, when he was on a bus travelling Australia.

Turned out it was one of the neighbours of a school friend, and we all used to go biking together when I was about 16.

According to T. Pratchett, 1 in a million chances happen 9 times out of 10. (Guards guards, I think)

Oooh, just remembered another.

Glastonbury, 1995  My wife to-be and i were watching Oasis headlining on Friday night when she made me aware (by poking me and pointing) that the bloke stood in front of us was none other than Jarvis Cocker (he was still alive then, obviously. As was his Dad)  I don't know when he'd snuck in but in that way you are craning to look past a 6'5" lanky git that's stood in front of you i just hadn't realised.  So we listened in a bit on his conversation, with his band mates / entourage and they were basically arguing whether to stay here 'and check out the competition' or go to see Prodigy on the other stage.

Cool starry bra, eh.

FFWD to November 1995 and I'm at Earls Court to see Oasis again, this time with a mate. And I'm recounting the story to him about how last time I saw Oasis I'd been stood right behind Jarvis. We were walking at the time to one of the bars and at that exact moment as we paused to let someone come through a doorway in front of us...... 6'5" lanky, geeky glasses - guess who?

One that's not travel related:

Was sat in my brothers garden enjoy a drink with family, my sister in law bent forward to pick something up and just as she did the kids next door had kicked a ball over the fence. The ball hit the top of her chair (it would have been her head) and bounced back over the fence taking exactly the same path it came from. We all started laughing, sister in law had no idea what happened.

looking in a second hand book shop(rons) in poolewe on the west coast at old OS maps.

Picked up one of the area we live in. wife says nae its not really old enough for her being 1989. I opened it anyway for a look to see how things had changed.

Looked at a few things and went to see what the area round our gaff was like.

was my house not circled ..... - bearing in mind i live in the country with only 8 other houses near by.

My wife was trying to trace a relative of her fathers who left Wales in 1915 to fight in the war. He fought along side Canadians and word was he'd gone to live there after the war, but family in Wales didn't hear from him again. In 2010 she had almost given up hope of finding any trace through the usual family tree sites but she decide to put an appeal out to local newspapers in Canada, she started emailing from the west coast first and had a positive reply from an editor of a Kamloops paper who thought that her relative sounded like the father of his father in law and it only turned out he was!

What odds? Like looking for a needle in a field full of haystacks!

Jarvis Cocker's dead? 😩

Don’t know how well this will come across but the chances of this are slim-

I’m a lorry driver from Leicester, one day I was in Manchester at a job and got talking to a German lorry driver over from the continent who had his own lorry with a fancy paint job.

A few years later I was driving south on the M1 and was randomly thinking about that chap and his lorry and trying to remember what was unique about the paint job, at that exact moment I looked over to my right and there was the German and his lorry going North on the opposite carriageway!! Chances of that?

(It had a huge angel painted on it).

When I was a kid we lived at 52 'street name'...

Years later my uncle traveled around the world, meet an Australian girl in Australia, married her, moved back here to the UK...

Chatting about her life, it turns out years before she'd traveled the world, visited the uk...visited my home town... Visited my street... Lived for a few months with the couple in number 50...

Yep...she'd been living next door to us for a bit...

Odd.

DrP

Reminds me of a story from my college days back in the very early 90s.

A note in the register summonses me to the Principles office. A very tall fiery lady.

Upon entry to her office ,and despite my protestations that there must have been a mistake, she proceeded to read me the riot act about being seen smoking weed in the college grounds and that I was to be suspended after speaking with my parents later that day.

All day spent crapping myself as my old man was not the type to let that go.

Afternoon came, again summonsed to the Principles office to meet my doom.

Another chap was sat in their looking ashen. Turns out he shared my very uncommon name (christian, middle and surname) and was the guy seen, not me!

Needed a spliff and lie down after that, I can tell you!!

Chatted with a bloke about surfing and surfboards in a car park in Narooma in 1992. Conversation lasted about an hour. Later I decided to track down his campsite and tent to invite them over for a drink. On my return I found a note under my windscreen from the same bloke inviting us over for a drink.

Drinks went well and we exchanged addresses. I returned to Sale and promptly lost the address. A week later he rolls by, decided he would eat his sandwich lunch with us on his way back to Ocean Grove. I didn't lose his address this time and then stayed with him in Victoria and Queensland and since then have flown back to visit him in Australia a couple of times and he's just recently been staying in my place (in England) for the third time.

He used to rib me mercilessly about worrying about sharks in the surf. Whilst staying with me in England in 2002 his then step son was on a scientific driving trip off Adelaide and one of his colleagues got taken by a great white. Step son switched his post doc studies from oceanography to climate change.

The odds are pretty low for many coincidences.       Sharing birthdays and names and connections.    You Need about 23 people to get matching birthdates in a random group.

A work colleague was on an internal flight in south america with his spanish wife on holiday when a drunken passenger became agitated and tried to get into the cockpit. My colleague had to intervene and he and another passenger restrained the male until the flight had landed. Colleague receives personal thanks from the pilot and gets a very nice letter from the airline thanking him for his efforts and gets a special mention at work.</span>

About three or four years later and my colleague is now retired and spends much of his time in spain playing golf. He's making up a four ball with two pilots from a Spanish airline who he has played with before and they bring along a south american colleague who has just joined their airline.

It was the pilot from the internal flight in south America.

looking in a second hand book shop(rons) in poolewe on the west coast at old OS maps.

Picked up one of the area we live in. wife says nae its not really old enough for her being 1989.

OT: she should check this out. Hours of fun.

Think this is probably an urban myth but I remember years ago reading of a man walking past a phone box, the phone rang and he picked it up on a whim - on the other end was a lady frim head office trying to get hold of him who'd dialled his employee number instead of his phone number. I have my doubts but I like it as a story. 🙂

Randomly took a mid-week day off with my wife,decided to visit my paternal Grandmother for the first time in about a year as it was long overdue.Arrive and are greeted by my Sister and her children which was odd enough, who have also randomly decided to visit same elderly Grandmother on the same day.Sat discussing the odds of this happening when the doorbell rings and it`s our Brother,random day same Grandmother visit etc etc.

Catching up on family gossip with TV on in the background,conversation eventually lulls and we all decide to leave,as we`re all putting coats on local news comes on to announce that a Family from Bristol have been killed in a Helicopter crash in Romania,six people from the same family confirmed as dead.

It was my Uncle on my Dads side,Auntie,Cousin,Cousins boyfriend,and two members of extended family unknown to me.

Went to France to ride bikes, got chatting to the guide, he went to my school in Edinburgh.

About 7 years ago I helped a chap jump start his car in a petrol station in Glasgow, he had a Corrado and a nice one at that.

Fast forward 4 years and I'd arranged to buy a Specialized Epic frameset. Went to the chaps house to pick it up and noticed a Corrado in the driveway, turned out to be the same guy!

My girlfriends dad was taking down an old fence and stabbed himself through the hand with a nail - over Easter weekend. The significence was not lost on the hospital staff.

Turned out to be quite a big deal, even though it wasn’t stuck in there or anything, it was really rusty so they had to put him under open up his hand and clean out the wound.

I left my childhood home in Lincolnshire back in 95, spent 5 years down south before moving to Derbyshire. Got involved with the local Scout group. After about 15 years, was working on one of our charity events and got chatting to our new assistant Beaver leader.

Turns out she was from the village I grew up in in Lincolnshire, about 8 years younger than me. I'd known her dad as he started as a Scout leader just before I finished Scouts, and he'd succeeded my dad as Group Scout Leader.

In 1951 my father was a member of the Glen Coe Mountaineering Club. Three male members of the club and another man died of exposure that New Year near Corrour after being caught in a blizzard and benighted while attempting to walk in to Ben Alder Cottage . The only survivor of the party of 5 was the wife of one of the members.

Forty years later my father had given evidence at a public enquiry in the Scottish Borders as a professional witness and went to the home of one of the objectors. He met the man's wife and was introduced to her as "Mr Cullen". At which point she asked him if he knew a "John Cullen"  He replied "I am John Cullen" and at that point recognised her as the survivor of the Courour tragedy who he had last met 40 years earlier.

My girlfriends dad was taking down an old fence and stabbed himself through the hand with a nail – over Easter weekend. The significence was not lost on the hospital staff.

Turned out to be quite a big deal, even though it wasn’t stuck in there or anything, it was really rusty so they had to put him under open up his hand and clean out the wound.

Did he rise on the third day...?

Had a lecturer at university who knew my dad from primary school.  Not surprising but the school was nearly 6500 miles away...

A great-grandfather on my mums side and a great grandfather on my dad’s side - both lived in the same small town in the 1920’s.  It wouldn’t be that unusual but the former was from Bristol, the latter from Northern India, they were both thousands of miles from their birth place, in Southern India and were not related in any way until my parents marriage nearly 50 years later.  In between times, my dads grandfather emigrated and fathered my dads mum another few thousand miles away in Mauritius and my dad emigrated here.

Not that interesting to most - but for me it’s fantastic to think that my great grandfathers - both from radically different cultures could have passed each other in the street.  They would never have guessed that through migration and social change they would be relatives post their deaths.

Slightly different, and probably easier to work out the odds.

Paternal family:

My great-great-grandfather was one of seven boys. There was one girl who died in infancy.

My great-grandfather was one of six boys.

My grandfather was one of two boys. His brother was killed in the war.

My father was one of two boys.

His brother, my uncle, has two sons.

One of them has two sons, the other has one son

My father has me and my sister, the first girl born in this line in about 150 years.

I've just had a son.

In 2011 I was one of a group of 8 from the UK who went on a field trip to Canada. We flew into Calgary, met up with some Canadian colleagues, got on a coach and headed south towards Lethbridge.

A few hours later, one of the group was feeling unwell so the coach pulled over to let them out and a few of us got out to stretch our legs. Whilst chatting i noticed a coin half buried in the dirt... it was an extremely weathered £1

My girlfriends dad was taking down an old fence and stabbed himself through the hand with a nail – over Easter weekend. The significence was not lost on the hospital staff.

Turned out to be quite a big deal, even though it wasn’t stuck in there or anything, it was really rusty so they had to put him under open up his hand and clean out the wound.

I went to visit him a couple of days after, only to find he'd discharged himself and there was no-one there.

Spooky!

Just worked mine out, 1:13,891

Short version as think I posted it here before.. got drunk at a mate's leaving do with one of his girlfriend's friends..

A few hours of drinking later it emerged she was a lady who "performed on webcam".. I then realised I'd previously seen her a few times (whilst failing to watch another girl I knew from way back, who worked on the same website)

She thought it was funny and wrote about me on her blog.

(We didn't hook up, both in relationships)

Did a 20 mile Lakes ride in May 2014 and repeated the same ride today.  Got a puncture in the same place both rides and ended up fixing it on the same piece of grass.  Anyone else had a puncture on the small climb after the gate as you leave Grizedale and get to the ridgeline overlooking Conniston?

Decorating thw master bedroom in our last house and I kept playing Atmoshphere by Joy Division.  Cue the next day and John Peel dies and on the rolling tribute on Radio 2 they keep playing...  Atmosphere by Joy Division!

Stayed in same hotel in Majorca as my boss on his honeymoon. But that's nothing compared to an ex who bumped into her parents neighbours in the Atacama.

Back around 1979-80 I went to Thassos with my then g/f on an early Club 18-30 holiday, when they were still a sort of hippy type thing, staying in local people’s spare rooms, etc. Second week there, a new group of people arrived, we were on the beach next day, and there was a bloke I knew from home, I didn’t think anyone else even knew where the island was!

An Instagram related one. Visiting the UK for the first time in years, rail replacement bus from Mcr airport to the center. Passed my old flatmate Pete who was walking past Oxford Road Station, neither of us are from Manchester. Haven't seen or heard of him for 20 years, we played in bands together too. Whoa that's weird, I think.

Later at the hotel I'm listening to Crass and cruising instagram. Steve Ignorant has a new band so I'm looking at photos... Bass player looks familiar. Yep, it's Pete.

Best coincidence was when I was working in print pre-press, and I had a query about an amendment to a job, so I phoned the client, there was no dialling tone or ringing tone, just a quiet line. After a couple of seconds I said hello?  A woman answered, said hello, who’s that? I said Adrian, from Westernprint. Oh, she said, I was just calling you, so I asked who she was. She was the client I was phoning! We had dialled each other at the exact moment and made the connection at the same time; what are the chances?

There’s another STWer with the same name as me - it’s not a particularly common name with multiple variants of spelling both parts. It’s a bit of a shock to get an email from yourself 😆

Friend of my dad has an old (190?) Mercedes grand Prix car that he drives around on historical car rallies all over the world. Only six of them left, very rare, and quite pricey I think.

On a rally somewhere in Arizona, middle of a desert, miles from anywhere, it konks out. Some investigation reveals a gearbox issue. Not a road side bodge, no phone signal, not seen another person all day.

Couple of minutes later battered pickup screaches to a halt next to them, local redneck leaps out.

What's the problem?

Gearbox

Hop in, I've got a gearbox for one them in my barn.

This sort of luck happens to him all the time. He doesn't seem to think it's odd.

My last holiday abroad before Euro 2016 was in Iceland. My last holiday abroad before the World Cup 2018 was in Croatia.

Both teams went on to knock England out of those tournaments.

Driving back from Weymouth we saw a sign for a truck off-road event in Borden. Odd thing to see, so we had a wonder around watching the event. Only there an hour. Three years later we were at Sunny Beach, Bulgaria. Hot night, fancied a drink so popped into a bar. On the tv was a truck event. From Borden, Hampshire. Pointed it out to my wife, who happily pointed back to the tv. And yes, there we were, on the tv watching trucks in ditches. Us in a random Bulgarian pub watching tv of us at a random UK event from three years previous.

I ran an old lady over with my motorcycle many years ago. She stepped out in front of me from around a stationary van while looking the other way with about 6 feet to spare. Court case of doom with her trying to sue for damages ensues. I win in spite of lots of created witnesses. Fortunately most didn't have the stomach for lying in court that they thought they would.

Anyway, about 8 months later I am boarding a plane to Tenerife, my only trip there ever, and the very same old lady is sat in my seat on the plane. I very politely tapped her on the shoulder to inform her. She looked like she'd seen a ghost.

My wife and I  bought the same house when we got married in 1998 that her parents bought when they got married in 1967 and subsequently sold it  in 1984.

Her parents bought it from my first primary school teacher.

I've a fairly rare surname that isn't spelt in the way that you might think when you hear it. I used to climb as my main sport. During the late 1980s I worked as a contractor to a building company in the South Lakes. When the 1990 recession started I moved down to N. Wales. Shortly after this another climber with exactly the same name including spelling was killed by rockfall in the North Lakes.

Fast forward fifteen years and I'm helping a friend with the Ramsay Round in Scotland. I'm pacing/dogs bodying for the first part of the Mamores and we get to the next supply point at a col. A figure emerges from a bivy bag, it's one of the labourers from the building company. He hands grub and water to the runners and looks at me.

"Oh!, Hello. We though you were dead!"

A pause ...

"You're looking well!"

Used to ride BMX a fair bit.

When I went travelling to Aus, I posted on FB I was in Sydney. A dude I rode with a couple of times was also there. We met up, "Oh you remember Paul? He's kicking about too" - I'd met Paul once or twice, nice guy. We hook up with Paul, "You guys know Bobby? He's here also". We meet up with Bobby, "Ah dudes i'm hooking up with Shane later we should all catch a beer." To be fair, Shane is Australian but last time I saw him he crashed at mine in the UK for a couple of nights.

Weird chain of events, was a great reunion though.