Whilst brush-cutting today a stone got chucked up, somehow made it past my full face visor and wedged itself firmly and painfully up my right nostril. I’ve never laughed so hard whilst being in pain. My boss didn’t believe me until I proceeded to blow it out

Tell me about your freak incidents/accidents/occurrences/warreva’s

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 specific 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!