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Me and a mate were driving home after a day out walking in Northern Ireland.
As we got about 15 miles from home we noticed that the same car had been behind us for most of the return journey.
We thought "just a coincidence" but started taking a slightly unusual route, still in the direction of home while watching the mirror.
The car stayed behind us, no closer, no further away.
We were getting a bit wary by now (it was the height of 'the troubles' and we'd been past a variety of coloured kerbstones on the journey, and it was now dark) so decided rather than going straight home we would drive through a big, and fairly rough, loyalist housing estate and see if they still came after us.
So we drove in, took a few random turns and then pulled in to the side of the road, lights off, to see if they followed.
We were a bit startled when the car came into view down the road after us. At this point we didn't know what was going on, but the adrenaline was flowing. The next turn would bring him straight past us and we were getting ready to get out of there asap.
Then the car turned in the opposite direction up a cul de sac.
Then it parked, and a guy got out, walked up to a house, unlocked the door, and went in.
We just sat there confused for a minute and then laughed our tits off. Somehow we'd managed to lead someone we didn't know about half way across NI and park almost outside their front door (in what was at the time the biggest housing estate in Europe), and scare ourselves half to death in the process.
I often wonder if he didn't think we were "following" him in a really clever way, but I guess he might not even have noticed?
It's a fantastic coincidence that *every* time I ride with new gloves I fall off
fasthaggis - MemberI once had a dream that my brother was stabbed,woke up in the morning with a horrible feeling and the memories of the dream still floating around, I mentioned it to my wife. A few minutes later a story came on the radio about a young london policeman getting stabbed to death, he had the same name as my brother.
Did you have the radio as your alarm clock? Same/similar thing happened to me when I had a radio-alarm and while 'asleep' I heard the news reporting [url= https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Julie_Ward ]this murder[/url]. There was a girl in my class at school of the same name and I ended up dreaming about her being killed... pretty creepy until I woke up properly and heard the next news bulletin.
When I lived in the States, went to a Gomez concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. Guy standing in next to me was an old pal from same class at Paisley College, hadn't seen each other nearly 10 years. Both recognised each other at the same time.
Maybe slightly less of a coincidence given we both did computing, and well, it was Silicon Valley.
I went to Medicine Hat in Canada in 2000 with my g/f & stayed 3 weeks with an old friend of hers called Moira who'd gone out there years before & was manager of the Med Hat branch of the Alberta Motoring Association, she was from a small village just outside Durham. Fast forward a few weeks & was at the hospital visiting my Dad & I spotted a guy wearing an Edmonton Oilers jersey, It turned out he was with the British army based near Med Hat & was back home to see his folks. He'd just phoned his Mrs back in Canada who'd been into town to insure the car with the AMA & had been talking to Moira!
Nothing, not one coincidence ever that I can recall. How spooky is that?
reas a few stories about people bumping into friends or neighbours halfway across the world. I once met neighbours on holiday in Portugal and just an hour ago I saw my next door neighbour at a motorway services 60 miles from home.
Makes me think that despite the world being huge, population centres are relatively few and there must be reasonable odds of meeting people you know in far away places at some point in your life. I'm a geek, would love to work out the odds on that.
Bought myself a solo holiday, one of those travelling in a group type trekking trips. Flew into Cairo and got to my hotel in the early hours.
Was having breakfast the next morning before going into the 'get to know you' meeting when i became aware of someone stood nearby and staring at me.
Turned out to be my mate Terry, he was only the tour guide, plus the computer had allocated him to be my room mate for the trip.
He was a bit worried because the company didn't allow guides to have friends and family on their trips.
Biggest city in Africa and the first person i meet is a mate from home.
When I was 10 we went on a camping holiday. First day there started playing football with a a young lad the same age as me. We got on well & spent the rest of the holiday mucking about and mainly playing football. End of the 2 weeks went home.A month later when we went back to school there was a new kid in my class.
Same boy.
You should write a musical about it.
My one.
I was at Glastonbury 1995 watching Oasis when the wife started nudging me. There in front of us was a tall, gangly man in geeky glasses. None other than Jarvis Cocker (sad news about his dad recently, mind) and as it turns out, the rest of Pulp, who were headlining the following night in place of the Stone Roses. They were arguing about watching Oasis on the main stage ('checking out the competition') or going to see The Prodigy on the other stage.
Fast forward a few months to Oasis at Earls Court, with a mate. I am recounting the tale of the last time I saw Oasis, and how JC was standing in front of me, and...... and the door into the bar opened at that exact moment and Jarvis Cocker walked in.
I've not been to another Oasis gig, nor have I seen Jarvis anywhere other than on stage at his own gigs. Amazing, eh?
my first first half marathon several years ago, I trained hard and lost a load of weight to become fit enough but was never going to set the world alight with my time - I just wanted to get across the line. Set myself a time to beat none the less of 2h:15mins. Figured it a good place to start my HM career but didn't want to go any slower than that, and told my supporters accordingly.
Timing chip in shoe, set way back in field so didn't cross start/finish line for several minutes after timing clocks started. Knew my pace was close but sprinted last section when I realised time was slipping away.. Crossed the line and went to check my printed time in the organisers hut, 2:15.00.00 exactly.
To the bloody thousandth of a second. I checked all the other times, no one else had a round number so I couldn't account for it being a repeated glitch. Was just a one off.
Got a spooky one too... OooOOoOOhhhh.... When I was a wee lad of about 5, I used to climb into my folks bed in the middle of the night when for whatever reason I couldn't sleep.
I would tell them every following morning that I saw the strange ghost man again at the end of the bed, and he was waving at me. Apparently I would recount this in detail nearly every time I stayed in their room.
They told me years later that it freaked them the hell out because we had only moved into this place following the suicide of a man in that same room.
One from last week. I've been on secondment covering maternity leave for a girl I've known for a couple of years. She went to school in Yorkshire and uni in Edinburgh. I grew up in Derbyshire, now live in Edinburgh. I mentioned my dad had died during the secondment, separately I was talking about something when I worked at HSBC in Sheffield. She said her dad used to work there. So did my dad. She called her dad, who knew my dad as he used to do some training around the place. Just a small world thing, I suppose more significant because for a good couple of seconds I thought "I'll have to ask Dad about this" and then it got dusty.
I picked up some hitchhikers once (charity hitchhike) in the Vale of Glamorgan. The one had been taught by my Dad. Not particularly staggering since it's only about 60 miles away, but that's all I got.
Out of our team of 8 at work, 3 of us share the same birthday.
An GF of mine went away to uni, and lived in a shared house with some girls she hadn't met before. I went down and met the housemates one weekend and got talking; one of the girls was heading off to meet her boyfriend so I asked her about him. She told me his name and it was familiar, so I asked where he was from - turned out he was someone I'd gone to junior school with. Cool story eh 🙂
My two girls were born in the same room, in the same hospital, on the same day, within 15 mins of each other.....
4 years apart.
I have a couple
I raced PMBA Rd 1 at the weekend in Gisburn (great ride plagued by chain drops aplenty). my race number was 263 and I finished 263rd
Few years back I was flying the short hop from Copenhagen to Billund.
As people were boarding the plane, on the seats in front of mine one guy was in the window seat and the isle seat was empty. Another guy says to him while looking at his ticket, "I think you are in my seat sorry"
window seat guy relplies "sorry I'll move"
"No it's ok, only a short flight I'll just take the isle seat"
Everyone on board now and the stewards do their walk up and down the plane, then begin to have a discussion at the front of the plane, lots of looking at clipboards and scratching heads.
Pilot announces a slight delay as there seems to be 1 person too many on the flight.
10 mins later steward walks up to the seats in front of me and asks the 2 guys for their boarding passes, the isle seat was not allocated and should be empty.
Turns out the 2 have exactly the same names - first, middle and surnames one had checked in online and the other at the airport desk and been given the same seat by the girl at the desk.
Not me but a friend. She did a gap year before going to uni, spent several months in Nepal living in a remote village on the side of some mountain, teaching English at the local school. Fast forward a couple of years, she’s at a UK university but doing a placement year in Toulouse, France, teaching English to Air France pilots (I was in Toulouse doing a placement at Airbus). In our local bar one evening, this random dude walks up to her and says hi. Cue big hugs etc, turns out he was one of her star pupils from that Nepali school, he’d got a scholarship to study in Europe, and had ended up at the university in Toulouse, and then happened to end up in the same pub as my friend. Spooky weird.
My biggest coincidence? I have been thinking about starting a thread about coincidences for a few days and have been formulating what to write all day today. Then I come on here late this evening to start the thread and find someone else has beaten me to it by a matter of hours. What a bleedin' coincidence that was!
On 3 separate flights between Athens and London, on one year, I was allocated a seat on the plane next to the same guy.
Saturday nights used to regularly watch Cilla hosting Blind Date. Me and my ex used to have a little game where we tried to guess the which one of the contestants we would choose i.e. which girl from the 3 I would choose. One night she was in the kitchen preparing a meal and 3 guys were on the stools waiting to be picked. One of the guys looked slightly like Charlie Sheen who my ex seemed to like, so I called her in from the kitchen and said you'll really like this guy. She came in to the room and look startled and asked whether he came from Bedford. Apparently it was her first boyfriend.
Bumped into a couple from my gym in a small hotel reception area in Laos - 30 seconds either way we would have missed each other.
One from tonight - met a friend who hadn't seen for ages. She was telling me about taking her son up to uni in Manchester and dropping him off at the student accommodation in Hulme. Apparently the student block was in exactly the same spot as the now destroyed flat that my friend had squatted in during her time in Manchester 20+ years ago.
First date with my now wife. I met her in her town for a coffee.
Time runs away a bit with the chatting and I realise I'm late for my nephews pantomime (of all things).
She walks with me back to the car, which I have parked within 30m of her house!
Another one, though it wasn't me. A group of mates were out walking in the woods late one night, having consumed some funghi of some sort, and one of them got the urge to walk over to a tree and put his hand in a hole in it.
Turns out it was a geocaching spot and there was a tupperware pot in it with some random stuff in. Not sure what they put in it for the next person!
I lost my watch at Leeds festival. It was a gift from my aunt after my uncle died and it meant a lot to me. I was gutted. Went and had a few beers, accepted it was just material goods etc.
Later that day went to see another band (less than jake) at one point they got the whole crowd to sit down, just before i sat i checked to se if there was anything i didn't want to sit on, and there was my watch. Happy days!
Fast forward a few years, I'm at uni, I go to see a band at the union (Less than jake) I lose my watch again. This time i never find my watch, but as I'm kicking around the rubbish at the end i find £20, a bag of weed, a crap baseball cap and then went home with a pretty girl.
Me and a mate spent New Years Eve in a small Snowdonia pub some years ago and one particular woman in there stood out. We didn't speak to her then but I went on holiday to Italy with the same mate the following summer and she was one of the climbing instructors over there. 2 years later we went MTBing in Moab and she was one of the owners of the company we went with. Small world.
Other than me being on an enforced sabbatical from STW when this thread was started...
One Xmas or new year, I don't remember which..
I was walking my pooch on the beach in the wee small hours which was standard at the time as I lived 50 yards from the seafront..
I noticed a fire out at sea on the horizon and in my deluded state which had resulted from over exuberance during the festivities, I jumped to the conclusion that the flames could only be a volcano!
Rushing home I alerted my mate who rented a room on the floor below, and desperately tried to persuade him to find higher ground with me as a tsunami was imminent..
After frantic and high tempered discussions he finally managed to calm me down with cider and wise words and I fell into an anxious slumber..
The next day we awoke to rolling news reports of the devastating tsunami in south east Asia..
It was pretty disconcerting
My girlfriend and I got the same very unusual and distinctive religious symbol tattooed on the same place on our right hand... Two years before we met
Honeymoon on first marriage, small rustic style hotel on Corsica, another English couple in dining room, struck up conversation as you do. Turned out that they were also on honeymoon, over next few days found out that he was a Bristolian and went to the same school as me, BGS, but two years lower.
Even more bizarrely, his wife's grandmother had lived and died in the house that had been demolished to build the small block of maisonettes that we were currently living in in NW London!