COINCIDENCE

My father was a POW who managed to escape from his captors by jumping from a moving train whilst being transported from Italy to Germany. After living rough for a while he met and was helped by a young farmer and his pregnant wife. They were afraid to take him home as the risk was so great, but the gave him food and drink and indicated that he should head for the mountains.
Eventually he came to an isolated farm and the farmer and his family took him in and hid him for several months. In that time he fell in love with their daughter and after the war they married.
Fast forward 30 years and my now widowed grandmother moved from the farm into retirement. Sitting on a bench in a park one day she is joined by an elderly gentleman and they make polite conversation.
It turned out that he was the young man who had first helped my father! Funny old world isn't it?

30 odd years ago I got a job that entailed me travelling to a town 300 miles away for training.On my first night there I had dinner with the young man who was to be my assistant manager.We talked about where he came from and he mentioned an area I knew as my dad grew up there so I asked what his family name was in case my dad knew them.He told me and I was quite surprised as it was my family surname too.So I asked what his mothers name was and he told me that and that her Dad was A ,D......,that was also My dad s name and the young man was my cousin that I'd never met as his family had moved before I was born.I immediately called Dad and he spoke to the guy and confirmed he was indeed who I thought he was and got his mothers address to get back in touch.After 30 years of not seeing them it seemed a huge coincidence that we both went to the same interviews and both got jobs in the same place that meant we would work together.We still keep in touch now ,mainly by e-mail and FB

I have just been speaking to my daughter who was telling me about visiting a customer this afternoon called Mrs Waspe. As she was driving away afterwards guess what landed on her steering wheel? Yes, a wasp

Thankyou all so much for sharing your experiences.
Its made amazing reading and really given me pause for thought.
In particular,I think Skweek1 and Theoddbird have a point and there is so much more to this wonderful life than we can ever know.

We went to St Agnes in the Scilly Isles one summer. We had rented a tiny one bedroom bungalow that belonged to a B&B. We were sitting outside on the first day and lo and behold there were a couple from our home town whom we knew well, as we played music with them. Not only had we picked the same week on the same island, but it turned out that they had booked our bungalow, but the owners finished up double booking by mistake, so they were being accommodated in the attached B&B!

We were on holiday in the Lake District. Having a walk around by the boats in Keswick. Just stopped to admire the view and chap stood came and stood beside us and addressed my husband by his first name. He worked with my husband but in a different building. He was on holiday there too.

We took our boys to Beamish museum once. Went into the school room and a neighbour, her husband, and two sons were in there at the same time. They lived in Coventry and were there on holiday.

As a child, on holiday in Christchurch, Hampshire we went to the post office. Got in the queue. The person who joined us in the queue was someone who lived a street away from us in Bristol

I believe things are meant to happen so they are not coincidences....they were planned as our life is planned as our soul enters our body. Planned to teach us things so that our soul can grow and become wise....

I went to another school at the age of 11 in a small town in Scotland. I was only in the class for two terms and I moved to another school. I had met a girl at the other school called H.

When I was 18 I went to Edinburgh to start work and lo and behold, H was there. We went our separate ways and then 5 years later I moved to London working in a small place but very central and who should be there but H. We have remained friends ever since.

I met my husband in east Anglia; I was from Manchester and he was born in Bolton and raised in Devon. I did his and my family trees and discovered that our ancestors had lived on the same street in a tiny Lancashire hamlet/village (currently 405 people live there) at the same time in the 1800's.

When I was 20 I went to New York to visit some relatives and do a bit of travelling with a girlfriend. I went to the top of the Empire State Building, and banged into a friend I'd been at school with. She was travelling round the States from West to East (having been in Australia for a bit) - I was planning to travel from East to West. Neither of us knew the other one was going to be in NY - what were the odds of us a) being in NY at the same time and b) being at the top of the Empire State building at precisely the same moment (this was in the mid '60s when the young didn't travel as much as they do now either!).

My husband was born in a taxi which had pulled over into the car park of a cinema for the actual ‘event’. Our first date was a trip to the same cinema. The cinema was nowhere near where we lived at the time and we did not find out until many years later that it was the same cinema where he was born.

A couple of years ago I was sitting outside a temple in India chatting to a man who mentioned that he was waiting to have knee replacement. I said I was too. When he asked where I was to have them done, another man said “oh, I was near there last week at a college reunion. I asked if It was one arranged by ~~<<<<~~ and he said it was. The person who arranged the reunion was my best friend.

When baby number one arrived we were living in a rather grotty garden flat. H did a good job of exploring alternative accommodation, but we were on a limited budget so options were limited too. One day we came home form an outing to find a stranger on our doorstep, he was a landlord and said he had a flat we might be interested in, but that we needed to view it there and then as he had others who were lining up to look too. The rent was a bit steeper, but it was in a much nicer area and a much better prospect for us. We did very quick calculations as we drove over to view - you know the 'what is the least we need' sort. We would be moving from semi-furnished to unfurnished and decided that essentially we could cope with a rent hike, but we definitely needed a cooker and a wardrobe.
We arrived, we viewed. All the flat had was ... a cooker and a wardrobe. We said yes and had some very happy years there!

As a child in the 50’s I collected postcards and had a box full of them that people gave me. One of my favourites was one that had been sent to me with a picture of the Royal family on it. In my teens I lost interest and think my mother put them into a church sale - I never gave them another thought. 50 years later having moved house many times and living a long way from my home town, a friend walked into my house carrying my postcard having recognised my maiden name on it. Her son had taken a box of cards after his grandfather died and my card was in it. Goodness knows where it had been in the previous 50 years! I still find it very strange that it’s in my possession again.

Many years ago I was teaching English as a foreign language in Spain, and we took on a new German teacher. She asked me where I was from and I said Norfolk. “Oh I know someone from Norfolk,” she says. “Perhaps you know him.” Yeh, right, do you know how big Norfolk is? She then proceeded to name one of my best friends! I had her write him a letter (pre-email days) and use a nickname for him that she didn’t know - he came back wanting to know who she’d been talking to! (It wasn’t a very complimentary nickname!)

As Russell Brand says, our physical senses are very limited (for example animals can see, smell and hear more than we do, sense earthquakes and so on) , so there is a great deal going on around us that we are not usually aware of, but sometimes we get little glimpses through the barrier.

Had a fleeting romance with a young man. We both went our separate ways and seven years later happened to encounter each other on a street in a very large city whilst with other individuals. Both lived in entirely different areas from previously but managed to re-engage with a bit of good luck investigating past haunts. The rest is history and a rather lovely one at that until he died. Fate or magic coincidence? Who knows? Either way, I'm certainly not complaining.

Many years ago I was walking with my mother in a valley in Sussex - somewhere we'd never before visited together. Suddenly I thought of a man who'd been a family friend , but hadn't seen or thought of for 20 years or so. I said to my mother "I wonder what happened to (name)" . She then told me that when she was a young woman she and this man had walked in this valley and he had asked her to marry him.

2 incidents spring to mind:
One day I was daydreaming and just wondered what an old schoolfriend called Jenny was doing these days, as I hadn’t seen her for over 30 years. I went shopping in town later that day, and guess who was in a queue right in front of me, Jenny !
Before my Dad died, him and Mum were planning a dream trip to New Zealand. Mum had been a “ metal detecting” widow for many years as Dad was obsessed. Mum then asked if I would go to NZ with her. On our 1st day over there, we got off the coach and there in front of us was a field with about half a dozen men with their metal detectors ! Mum took it as a sign !

My daughter was backpacking in India, leading a pony up a rugged mountain track in the Himalayas, only to hear a man coming the other way call "Pint of Guinness & packet of cheese'n'onion?" It was the barman from her local pub when she'd been living in the Channel Islands the previous year...small world.

When I was 16 I was going out with a lad and thought I was madly in love (as you do). I was brought up in a strong Catholic family and each night I used to pray to God 'please let me marry (and say this lad's name)'. Now this wasn't a particularly common name. Guess what? A few years later I met DH and he has exactly the same name!! I think I've posted this before, so apologise in advance.

Wilhelm, not Wilhelmina! I spotted predictive text trying to type Meistersingers, but missed this one.

Chance is the fool's word for Fate: The Gay Divorce, starring Fred and Ginger.

Fate is the fool's word for Chance: Goethe, Wilhelmina Meisters Lehrjahre.

Take your pick.

I don't really believe in coincidence, because I feel that every synchronistic experience has a message to pass on. Maybe you and the other lady were just there to encourage the other chap to go for his dream of tortoise ownership.

DH and I had almost always lived within a few miles of one another all our lives (we'd both moved repeatedly) and it wasn't until we met at OU summer school that we finally discovered our soulmateship! We were doing the same course and had a choice of several weeks and 3 different venues. Felt like we'd finally caught up.

How often do you find yourself with some information you want or need, only to find that you go into a charity shop or open a book at random to find the precise page with the answer staring you in the face? Or you're just browsing the web by chance where your eye is caught by some site which is just what you are seeking.

Me too Nina the nana, secretly I think it's bunkum but it brought OH a lot of comfort.