Truth is stranger than fiction
I wrote in a previous blog post about a coincidence. The example was not as obvious or personal as the many I have experienced in the last fortnight, before and after a short holiday, and the fact that they all happened in such a short space of time is a coincidence in itself.
Thereby hangs a tale…
A name in a writer’s Facebook group was followed by some private correspondence on “messenger” where in the course of conversation, we realised we had more than one friend in common. Another post from the same lovely lady with a reference to my local primary school led me to believe she must live close by. She did, two minutes’ walk through the playground a few doors away from both of us! We met on Saturday and talked about our newly published novels. Hers has only just come out and I can’t wait to read it! ( The Housekeeper of Worthley Hall : Beverley Bowry: Amazon.co.uk: Books)
A few days ago I discovered that a recorder playing friend (this other hobby is proving to be a great source of contacts outside the writing world) who had returned to Ipswich for a golf event as well as to play with our small group again, had been at the same golf club at the same time as me (I was there for my mother in law’s wake rather than to play golf.)
In the previous week, traffic to the south of the M25 was particularly bad, and rather than wait for our planned picnic in the South Downs we turned into a service station. I was remarking to my husband that the first outside table we came to wasn’t a patch on Butser Hill, when a familiar voice said “no it isn’t” and I found myself sitting in front of another recorder playing friend. I recalled how an almost identical thing happened to me ten years ago when I met someone from the same orchestra in a service station 100 miles away from either of us.
It gets even more strange! On the holiday, the quiet couple next to us turned out not only to live a few streets away from us but as well as having other friends in common, to have known our vicar’s husband since he was a child!
It all proves my previous observation that although unlikely coincidences may stretch credulity in a novel, they do happen.