Small world syndrome

[alan]

I recently travelled from York to Derby on the train.Whilst waiting on the platform a complete stranger ,also a cyclist, & I got to chatting.
Circumstance dictated that we sat one behind the other on the train & were then able to continue chatting.
It transpires that he lives approx. 6 miles from me.
He is the gaffer of my neighbour of 4 doors away.
The world suddenly seemed a smaller place.

The daughter of the woman sitting next to me worked in a building in Newcastle upon Tyne where I had a 3-day-a week project in the early 1970's.
That seemed a bit spooky even.

and when I arrived home, a woman I have known for 40 years was in the lounge waiting to shower me with TLC

[mrcharly-YHT]

I went on holiday to Australia in 1992. At the time I lived in Holmfirth.

I stayed in a wooden hut in a forest, 300miles from Perth in Western Australia. In the middle of a night, during a terrible storm, a group of wet travellers staggered in the door.

One of them was from Holmfirth, and a friend of mine was looking after their dog.

[Mr Larrington]

As a Penniless Student Oafette, TWFKAML's best mate was a bloke called Axel.  Axel's mum's best friend was a lady named, IIRC, Sabine.  Sabine was the then¹ Lt. Larrington's former grilf.

1 - about 1954

[mike]

when Mrs Mike was at university, she went out with a bloke called Phil for about 2 years.

when I was at (a different) university I went out with a girl called Sue for about six months.

Phil and Sue were brother and sister.

Mrs Mike and I never met at the time, although we did sleep in the same bed on consecutive nights.

[hellymedic]

Ten years ago, bored and at a loose end, I was new to the interwebby thing and surfed the users' home pages of my ISP.
I liked some music I downloaded and sent an email to the composer. It turned out that:

1) My Dad had taught his MSc course (Material Science, Thames Poly)
2) I had sat with his boss's late wife in choir (Uxbridge Choral Society)
3) I had probably been in the same ward as his late Mum in 1997 (Poole)
4) We had both been involved with the London Cycling Campaign in our respective areas but had never met.

He's living with me now...

[Woofage]

I once met a bloke (a complete stranger) who was born in the same house as me.

[Wowbagger]

College (Blackpool) friends of ours once moved to Wisbech and sent us the Post Office (British Telecom hadn't been invented then) card telling us their new phone no.

I dialled the number and when what I thought was my pal answered, I adopted a silly voice.

"Wando!" replied the chap at the other end.

"Pardon?" said I in my normal voice.

"That is Mike Wand isn't it?"

"How do you know Mike Wand?"

It transpired that a clerical error by our pal had sent us the telephone number of a Steve Wilkins, to whom I had inadvertently been speaking.

Steve Wilkins had mistaken me for Mike Wand, with whom he used to go to teacher's training college in Weymouth.

Mike Wand lived in the next road to me and taught in the same school as I did.

Steve Wilkins taught in the Queen Elizabeth School in Wisbech, as did my pal, although one was in the Girls' school and the other the boys'.

The strange and convoluted nature of this coincidence has haunted me for the best part of 30 years.

[Jezza]

I was sitting on the porch of a bottle store in Malawi when a bus pulled up. Two whites got out, looked around and then headed towards the store. One of them looked familiar, but I couldn't place him. They said hi and ordered two beers, and we sat there while I silently racked my brains. It took about 10 minutes, but then I turned to him and said 'It's Gavin, isn't it.' He was quite taken aback. We'd been in the same class at primary school in England.   

[toekneep]

My Mum and Dad were on holiday in Spain not long after I had moved to a tiny village in Wales. They had visited me there once but had not committed my address to memory (too many long Welsh names for them) and had failed to add it to my Mum's address book. Whilst writing postcards sitting outside a cafe, my Mum turned to my Dad and explained that she didn't have my address and the only part of it she could remember was Machynlleth. A lady on the next table politely interrupted and said, "Did I hear you say Machynlleth? I was born there." The longshot being that by describing the valley I lived in and the location and appearance of the cottage, the lady was able to give my Mum my address.

I got the postcard. 

[ChrisO]

My wife and I were on an island on the Great Barrier Reef that only has about 150 people at any one time.

We got chatting to two English girls who had been seated at the next table.

One of them not only worked in the same company as me (which only had about 100 employees - she was on another floor though) but we later discovered she lived six houses away from us in the same street in London.

[toekneep]

That reminds me of the farmhouse B&B just up the road from where I lived in my previous post. Two couples were booked in for the same weekend and arrived within half an hour of each other. Whilst taking tea and cake with the farmer's wife it transpired that they lived a few doors apart on the same road in a town in Essex but they didn't know each other. The farmer's wife had a real problem with that, she simply could not get her head round it.

[Chris S]

Fifteen years ago, we came and settled in Mid Norfolk. Great place to bring up kids and an easy pace of life. At that time, we weren't aware of any family history connections with East Anglia - my Dad's family all came from Weybridge, my Mum's from Buckinghamshire.

A couple of years ago, I started tracing my family tree, concentrating on my Dad's side - pretty optimistic move for a Smith.

Turned out, my Great Grandparents lived in the next village, and were married in this church - which we can see from our house.

[woollypigs]

I meet a Danish guy in Australia in a pub, got chatting, other then he was from Denmark and his mom lived in the same town as me, we did not have any other links. Until I got back from Australia and went to get my clothes washed at the local "wash an go" and the proprietor of set place said "I know you". It was the bloke I meet in Australia's mum and he had talked to her about our meet.

When I was living in Camden I was in my local pub, and my old school mate came and sat down next too me, haven't talked to him for 10 years at the time.

[LE]

I have a friend from nursery school.  When ever we has lost touch, we have always come back together again through spurious links.

First time we lost touch was after we left school.  A couple of years later I started work with a guy who started talking about his girlfriend.  It turned out to be her.

They split up, we lost touch again until a friend from London told me that she worked with an old school friend of mine.  It turned out to be her again and she was living and working in the big smoke.

Again we lost touch, then one day I was helping my cousin move into her new house.  The neighbour propped around with a cake to welcome her. Surprise, surprise, it was my old school friend yet again.

We sort of lost touch again, until I one day last year I heard someone shout my name as I walked across the quad.  I looked up and there she was again.  She had just started a degree programme at the University. 

I think fate has decided that we need to keep in touch for some reason.

[Wowbagger]

That reminds me of the farmhouse B&B just up the road from where I lived in my previous post. Two couples were booked in for the same weekend and arrived within half an hour of each other. Whilst taking tea and cake with the farmer's wife it transpired that they lived a few doors apart on the same road in a town in Essex but they didn't know each other. The farmer's wife had a real problem with that, she simply could not get her head round it.

Well someone's got to live in Essex!

[Jaded]

When I was at University I made some friends out of the 160 or so year group. There was Simon, the punk rocker, from Inverness.

I had a surrogate mum in the form of Mum's cousin, who lived in Edinburgh. I was talking to her about friends etc. She produced a photograph of some young kids playing on the lawn at the house they grew up in. "that's Simon's father there, standing by the pram, and that's your Mum in the pram".

[Jacomus]

At Reading Festival 2004 (a month or so before I went to uni) I used a 3 man catapult (tenner from play.com) to launch a full English Breakfast (uncooked) about 200m across the campsite in the middle of the night.

A couple of months later, one of my closest friends at uni (who shares my name) was recounting a story of Reading Festival, where he and his mates had been sitting outside, enjoying some fragrant, rather long, cigarettes when out of nowhere raw bacon and sausages and assorted bits of food lashed down and hit them!

I fired 1 breakfast, at random, into a campsite of however many thousand people, and it hit just so happened to hit a guy who shares my name and is now one of my firmest friends after living on the same floor in halls at uni

[alan]

There is some spooky amazing coincidences on this thread

[Mr Larrington]

The grilf of the drummer in the band in which my grate frend Mr. Sunshine plays guitar used to work in the same building as me.

[Sergeant Pluck]

At Reading Festival 2004 (a month or so before I went to uni) I used a 3 man catapult (tenner from play.com) to launch a full English Breakfast (uncooked) about 200m across the campsite in the middle of the night.

A couple of months later, one of my closest friends at uni (who shares my name) was recounting a story of Reading Festival, where he and his mates had been sitting outside, enjoying some fragrant, rather long, cigarettes when out of nowhere raw bacon and sausages and assorted bits of food lashed down and hit them!

I fired 1 breakfast, at random, into a campsite of however many thousand people, and it hit just so happened to hit a guy who shares my name and is now one of my firmest friends after living on the same floor in halls at uni

Cracking tale 

[ChrisO]

I am in general a big fan of amazing coincidence and I find it fascinating to track things back to tiny, seemingly insignificant events.

If I hadn't gone to a nightclub in Canberra one night in 1991 then the following would never have happened:
met a girl who would become my GF
and move to Darwin with me
but not find a job
leave and come to England
get engaged
move to London to get married
realise that was a terrible idea
get to the point of having enough money for a fare home or to stay another six weeks
get some shifts at Sky news and decide to stay after all
meet my wife who was then a reporter at Sky
get married
have kids
and a totally different life.

[Jaded]

I'm afraid I have a similar one to Jacomus. Also at Reading, but many years before. My friends and I had partaken of the cheap wine that was available - in what seemed like gallon containers. We had some nice blue plastic sheeting that we sat on. Until one of my friends was quite sick.

What to do? Simple. The Swiss Army Knife came out and we cut the plastic sheet into two pieces. Then we moved, leaving one bit behind.

Many, many months later I met some people who had been to the same Reading Festival, and some foul dunk people threw up in front of them, then the bastards cut the plastic sheet and moved away.

I agreed, that was a disgusting thing to do...

[Wobbly John]

We once recieved someone elses mortgage statment in the same envelope as ours. It belonged to someone we used to live next door to - we had both moved house, a year or so apart, several years previously.

[toekneep]

I was working in a solicitors office and I needed access to one of the secretaries PCs to make some changes to it. She asked if she could just finish the letter she was doing first. I wouldn't normally dream of looking at what somebody was typing under such circumstances but something made me look twice. The letter was addressed to the owner of the house I had sold two years previously.

[LE]

One of the nurses who looked after me when I was in hospital once, used to live in the house I had just bought.