Coincidences

It's a particular date in our family when
1. my daughter was born
2. my uncle, who is still living, was born
3. my paternal grandad died
4. his daughter, my Aunt died.
5. many years ago new born twins died.

The date 8th August - or 8th of th 8th.

When I had my first child, we had already decided what we were going to call her. The day after she was born, while I was still in hospital, my husband woke up in the morning at home and put on the radio. The song that was playing was "Louise" by Phil Everley. Guess what name we had decided on!!!

Hailed a taxi at Waterloo station after an evening out. When I told the driver where I wanted to go, it turned out that he had grown up in the house next door to where I lived! Quite a coincidence in a city the size of London!!

Had a holiday in Austria one year and two years later while holidaying in Corfu we bumped into a couple who had been on the same Austria trip.

On holiday in Sydney I bumped into someone, now living there, who had for a short while rented the house next door to us.

Do you think we who have all these coincidences are tuned in to them?
Another one;
My DM's father was from a small town on the west of Ireland. He had left in c1900 to train as a ship's engineer in Glasgow. He spent his life in Burma and died long before I was born. My DM married a Kiwi and we grew up in NZ. She didn't go to Ireland, at least not with me.

25 years ago DH and I decided to drive to this village to see if any cousins remained.
We crossed on the ferry to Belfast late at night. The North was still a bit daunting as the police stations were surrounded in barbed wire. We drove through the night arriving early on Saturday morning. No-one was about apart from one woman. I stopped her and asked where we could find a café and a toilet. She apologised and said nowhere was open yet but we could come into her house. She gave us coffee and biscuits.
I told her I was looking for my DGF family.
"What was his name?" She asked in that soft Irish brogue. I told her and she said "but that's my name"
So the first person I spoke to in Ireland was a cousin.
It was the start of a magical week.

OH and I went strawberry picking years ago and sometime during the hour we were there I lost my sunglasses. A few days later I returned, without any real hope of finding them. I had only been searching for a few minutes when I made my way towards the only other people in the vast field, a young family. Just as I reached them the youngest boy held aloft a pair of sunglasses and shouted excitedly to his mum "look what I've found". Yep, they were mine!!

When I first moved to France , met some other Brits and
it turned out that the mother of one had been our neighbour.

The Brits employed a Chef for their campsite and this guy
had run a restaurant on the same road in England and had
even cooked our Wedding lunch!

My cousin visited our uncle regularly. In later years, after becoming a widow, she met and married a man who had also visited that same house regularly to see his aunt - married to our uncle.

My life is a series of coincidences - I shouldn't be surprised when another happens, but I always am. Meanwhile (ages ago), my son was talking to another youth from Australia, and he said that he had a cousin in Malta - who was my son's best friend, sitting in the desk next to his, in class.
Once I was drawing the winning numbers for a lottery in the school where I worked, and I said that I would not draw the next number, because people would think I cheated... and sure enough, the other woman drew my number. I am the person who finds a shard of eggshell in the icing sugar of an Easter Egg; the person who finds 7 sausages in a tin of 8... etc.

Years ago when my children were in primary school I used to chat to one of the other mothers who came from the North East like me. The family eventually moved away and we hadn't been close enough to keep in touch. Many years later DH and I had a long weekend in Florence. One day we climbed to the top of the Dome and up at the top we bumped into the woman and her husband. Exchanged news about our families and never saw them again!

My brother lived in Geneva and travelled extensively for his job. He was returning from Nairobi via the UK to visit our Mum and on his flight he had a very pleasant conversation with the gentleman sitting next to him who, it turned out, was the brother of my Dentist.

I become great pals with a new Secretary when we shared an office and we met up for a meal with our Husbands. Turned out that the two men had mutual childhood friends and haunts and my husband had worked alongside her Father at the Austin Motor Company.

Many years ago when I was single and working in a London office I made friends with a girl about my age. I left when I got married as I didn’t want to do the journey, and after a while said friend and I lost touch. About 10 years later my husband came home and said did you used to work with someone called D? I have just interviewed her for my secretary vacancy. We have been very close friends ever since. And yes, she did get the job.

My DD was born on 9/9 which had been my Granddad's Birthday, I hadn't though much about in the years since he died until that moment. It was the first thing my DM said "do you know what day it is?"

My strangest ever coincidence occurred when I was on a trip to Berlin. Before I left England, a friend of a friend, whose father was dying, asked me to tell her son to come home to see his grandfather one last time before he passed ... I told her that that I wouldn’t see him as I was going to a totally different location and tried to explain the geography of Europe to her, but she was absolutely insistent. At the time her son was in Czechoslovakia on holiday and it was well before the era of mobile phones or social media! I thought she was being absolutely ridiculous and told her so, as I didn’t want to leave with such a responsibility on my mind. But she wouldn’t have it. I duly set off on my trip. Amazingly, after stopping for something to eat, leaving the venue, some very old elevator doors opened and lo and behold who should walk out but her son. It was just like something out of a film, a minute later and we would’ve missed him. I duly told him about his grandfather and felt gratified to be able to deliver the important message. It’s never made any sense to me how such a thing could happen when it was was visiting an entirely different location in Europe and should not have been destined, in any realm of imagination, to bump into each other, but happen it did!

We were walking across a sandy beach - a vast expanse with the tide right out. We noticed a couple in the distance walking round and round, scanning the ground, circling back and starting over. When we caught up with them I asked if they'd lost something? Yes the woman replied, they'd lost their keys. I said we'd keep our eyes peeled for them. With that, I looked about me and there were the keys, right in front of me. I held them up - "are these what you're looking for?" I asked, laughingly. "OMG", said the girl, "we've been searching this whole area, walking backwards and forwards for the past hour!" The keys were quite literally about 3 metres from where they were standing!

Grannygravy Yes, were in Great Wakering now. Are you local to us?

DH was at the local bowling green one summer, a number of years ago, and got into conversation with an American visitor. He told DH that he was in NE Scotland to visit his town's twin in Scotland. When he told DH the name of the Scottish town, DH was immediately able to tell him the name of the American twin. The man was flabbergasted, saying that no one he'd met in the UK so far had heard of his home town, Mount Dora in Florida. We had spent an afternoon in that delightful small town while crossing from the east to the west of Florida. I had read about the town in a fairly obscure travel guide, and we went out of our way to visit, and took note of the sign relating to it's Scottish twin, which is about 70 miles from where we live.

We have on our wall a lovely copy of Decorated version of the American Declaration of Independence, several years ago,when I came downstairs one morning, I found that it had fallen off the wall and smashed on the floor , the date That day was the Fourth of July! I checked with my son, and he said that when he cam home around one am it was definitely still on the wall, how weird that it should stage it’s protest on the Fourth of July! I’ve since had it reframed, and it has behaved itself ever since.

We went to see Barbra Streisand in Madison Square Garden, and one of my colleagues said how jealous she was. When we got there, she was sitting in the seats next to us, a surprise birthday present from her husband.
They were next to us on the flight home too!

My brother got chatting to another Scottish fellow in a pub in London, and also had the ‘ oh I come from a wee village, you won’t have heard of it’ conversation. Turned out he had lived in our house before us, and his father worked with ours.

Chicklette one AC and family are in Shoeburyness close to the beach and I am in South Benfleet.

There are a few GN members in our area that meet up, hopefully we can meet up again soon it would be lively if you could join us.

We went for lunch the day before travelling to Thailand, the Manager asked us did we know Alan and Cherry, another couple of his regulars, as they had also recently gone there.
We were on a beach a few days later and as a couple approached us talking, I recognized a local accent and took the chance it was them.
As they came level and smiled, I said, hello, is it Alan and Cherry.... and it was.
We spent a nice few days with them, until they left 3 days later.

50 years ago, when we were on our honeymoon in Spain ,we were sitting by the pool and my husband recognised a lady sitting across from us . She was very tanned with long blonde hair and then she saw him and recognised him too. Turned out they were childhood friends (through their parents) and hadn’t seen each other for fifteen years.
It as a coincidence mainly because foreign holidays weren’t very common in those days and the place where we stayed was very remote. We have remained friends ever since!

Loving reading these posts as I am a great believer in fate.
In the summer of 1978 I went to Nice with 2 friends with our rucksacks and sleeping bags and slept for 2 weeks on the pavement outside the railway station. On our first night we got talking to 3 lads from Holland who were in the army and stationed in Breda. In December 1979 I was in Amsterdam with one of the friends for a weeks holiday and on the spare of the moment we decided to go to Breda. As we were walking out of Breda train station the 3 lads were walking towards us. We spent a lovely day together and still send Christmas cards to each others family. Also last Saturday I was at work and chatting to work friends during coffee break and we were trying to remember the date another friend's FIL had died from covid-19. I said it as 29 April it was the same day but 6 years later. as the husband of one of my friends I had trained as a nurse with. When I checked my mobile later there was a voice mail message from this friend which she had left at the same time as I had been talking during our coffee break.

Grannygravy I had no idea! Let me know if you meet up again. Funnily enough I’m in Hadleigh at the moment visiting one of my DDs.

When my boys were young, I hung my washing out one windy day and later found that one of my son's stripey sports socks was missing. Next day I went for a walk with my mum to local shops through a short-cut that we didn't usually use and I saw a sports sock with stripes hanging on a branch of a tree in someone's front garden about 15 mins away from my house. I took it off the tree and took it home...it was the missing sock.