I was Inter-railing around Europe. I was in Zurich, one evening, waiting for an overnight train. So I went into a bookshop in Bahnhofstrasse to get something to read. They had the usual small selection of English-language paperbacks, so I chose something by Robert Ludlum.

My train arrives, I get on, and I start reading the book. The first chapter begins in Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich.

What are the odds?

I was interrupted by a a fellow Brit. After a short exchange he claimed to be from the same small village as me. Although we didn't appear to know the same people he did know the village. Eventually he said "do you know Angus?" I told him the only Angus I knew was 50 ish and married to a girl in her 20s. "That's him, he's dead"
As I had had a beer with Angus just before leaving for Germany I Didnt believe him and resumed conversation with my colleague. Upon my return home I called in at my local to be told that Angus had died suddenly of a heart attack while I had been away. Quite a coincidence. I wish I had asked him how he knew Angus had died but of course I had no idea who he was.

and get speaking to a native, there is always the moment in the conversation you wait for...

"You are from England?" (wait for it...)

"I have a friend in England. Maybe you know them. Where are you from?"

Bolton

"They live in Edinboro!" (or Cardiff, Cornwall or Kent)

My wife was over in California with eldest sprog. Taken out for a meal she was confronted by someone going through the spiel above. Except in this case her relative DID live in Bolton. In fact the same street. Our next-door-but-one neighbour as it happens. It is a small world after all.

But I met my husband through a strange co-incidence.

I was going on holiday with my cousin Sara. At the airport, we went to the book store where they had a big display of the new Julian Barnes book. I went into raptures, "The new Julian Barnes! I didn't know it was out! I love him!" (I am quite an enthusiastic person), and skipped off to the till clutching a copy.

A couple of days later, at the hotel, Sara got chatting to a tall chap. Who happened to mention that he was pretty annoyed with himself for having left his book on the place. His new book. By Julian Barnes.

"You should go and talk to my cousin Hannah", said Sara, pointing him in my direction.

Next thing I knew, a tall chap loomed into view and muttered the immortal words, "So, do you like Julian Barnes?".

We were married a year later.

Julian Barnes, wherever you are, thank you.

I remember a news story years back of a guy who'd been walking along a street in Wigan and had answered a ringing payphone, only to be greeted by a woman from his work saying 'Oh, hi Dave, I'm just calling you to...blah, blah, blah'. Turns out she'd intended to ring his home number but keyed in his payroll number instead, which coincidentally was the same number as the phonebox he'd been walking past.

Very odd.

As part of my teacher training, in 1996 I taught in a small village outside Newcastle called Heddon-on-the-Wall.
One day in the staff room one of the teachers mentioned that she had adopted a child from Nepal. Oh, I said, I once did voluntary work in an orphanage in Nepal.
She then pulled out a photo album of the very same orphanage, in Kathmandu. It included pictures of her adopted child standing in front of a wall mural I had helped to paint.

About four years ago I went on holiday to Rome. On my last night there I bought a small poster for Fellini's La Dolce Vita from a news-stall.

Back home a couple of days later I went looking for a frame, but the poster turned out to be an unusual size. I tried Woolworths, Wilkinsons and Art without success. Finally I tried Habitat. They didn't have a frame the right size either, but on the way out I stopped to browse through some posters which were on sale at 70% off, and unidentifiable from their tubes.

Out of all the possible images in the world the very first one I picked out and unrolled, with an increasing sense of disbelief, was a larger version of the very print I had come looking for a frame to fit. This larger version, framed, hangs on the wall immediately to my right as I type.

Richard Madeley: I'm writing a book about coincidences.
Barry Cryer: That's funny - so am I.

Just before Christmas about 10 years ago I got home from the work and was greeted by a very upset Mrs P, who had only got in a few minutes before me. Some bastard had thrown a bottle through one of our front windows. We live in north London.

I was clearing up the broken glass when the phone rang. It was my Mum, who was really distraught. She was upset because another bastard had thrown a brick through a window in my youngest sister's flat. She lives in Edinburgh.

It hadn't happened to either of us before and it hasn't happened since.

I didn't get the single room I asked for at my chosen hall (Dalton) so ended up sharing a room with "Bill" (A WHOLE OTHER STORY) in a building which wasn't part of the main complex. There were about 14 of us in there, including some students from Singapore and one from South Africa.

6 of us ended up gravitating towards each other, and at the end of the week we went over to the pub behind the hall, the Lass O Gowrie, for a pint and a chat. 6 strangers getting to know each other.

Well, I lie, two of them, Graham and Mark knew each other from their 6th form in Leeds and during the evening the conversation topic moved onto friends from home, where other mates had gone to Uni etc and the conversation went like this..?
Graham - "I wonder if we'll meet him?"
Mark - "Who?"
Graham - "That bloke she mentioned"
Me - "Who?"
Graham - "There was this girl in our 6th form, Jess, who said to look out for this bloke she used to know in her previous school."
Me - "What about this bloke?"
Graham - "Just someone she knew..Gareth..Grant..Like your name"
Me - "Not Jessica Stevens..Mousy brown hair?"
Mark - "Shit, yeah!"

Turned out that Jess, who had been an unapproachable object of desire (until she got off with my best mate) through secondary school had moved to Leeds from North Wales for her 6th form. I hadn't seen her since she came back for GCE presentation evening (which I didn't attend-angry young man that I was) and our letters had petered out somewhat. She did know I was going to Manchester Uni, but that was it.

So, I ended up living in the same building as two chaps that went to the same 6th form as the girl who had broke my heart and moved into England and across the Penines two years earlier.

Small world indeed.

Gee, Jess. I wonder how you are.

a few of these experiences but none spring immediately to mind except that I was reading a Stephen Fry book, "Stars Tennis Balls" I think and a date was mentioned and it was the actual date that I was reading the book. Does a 365-1 chance equal a coincidence?

.... at very short notice, so I turned, as one does, to Ebay and selected from the many on offer. Row 12. Central. Nice!

When I had paid and submitted my address, the seller told me that he lived less than half a mile from me. It turns out he was the next door neighbour of my then girlfriend's sister.

I now rent her house, and he's MY next door neighbour.

Los Endos

I was working in a betting shop in Wimbledon. During the lull between the end of the afternoon meetings and the start of the evening racing this particular shop was deathly quiet so I spent most of the time watching the cricket on the TV behind the counter.
The door opened and a rather large shell-suited fellow entered, who I immediately recognised as the erstwhile QPR legend Rodney Marsh. After checking out the afternoon results he quickly left leaving me to my viewing of another England late-in-the-day batting collapse (this was the early 90's remember).
Half an hour later and my next customer came rushing into the shop and asked to peruse my behind the counter copy of The Sporting Life. This customer was instantly recognisable to all betting shop employees of South West London as Sir Stanley Bowles, also known as the true heir of the afore mentioned Rodney Marsh's iconic No 10 shirt at QPR.
Having served Stanley a few dozen times I felt emboldened to mention that my previous customer had been his predecessor as "The King of Loftus Road".
Stanley looked up from his analysis of the form with a look of surprise on his face....
"Have you got the Racing Post?"

I suppose you need to be a QPR fan to realise how weird this coincidence was - unfortunately Simon Stainrod wasn't the next guy to come in the shop.

the otehr night with my I-pod on shuffle and as I went past King's Cross station a Pet Shop Boys track came on.

Being Boring

Shame cos otherwise that would make a good story

That coincidences are bound to pop up every once in a while.

We don't tend to comment about things that have never happened before, or are in themselves not remarkable in any way. Am I making any sense at all? I suspect not.

Anyway, I think I might have mentioned this one before. Driving around London my brother and I were trying to remember a news reporter who was small, intense-looking, possibly Irish, and used to be on Thames News some 10 years earlier. We could picture his face and then it came to me - Ed Boyle.

About a minute later, we stop at some traffic lights. A man comes out of newsagent. It's Ed Boyle. He looks directly at us as if to say "Here I am - t'daa!"

I was sat on the Cobb with a couple of friends eating ice creams and one friend mentioned that The French Lieutenant's Woman (filmed there) was their favourite book. Being more musical than literary I mentioned my favourite John Fowles book was The Collector and the Jam tune inspired by it (The Butterfly Collector) was possibly the finest B side ever. After finishing our ice creams we stood up and crossed the road to go up the main street but our path was blocked by a big lorry and we had to squeeze past it sideways on. On the dashboard of the lorry was a 7 inch single... B side up... The Butterfly Collector by the Jam.

and diverted flights, Mrs. F and I (after a worrying wait on the standby list) finally got on a flight from Charlotte back to Gatwick. Our car was at Heathrow but this was a minor problem compared to what we'd been through. Anyway, the plane flew up the eastern seaboard of the US before turning right to head across the Atlantic. The pilot announces his farewell to the US and points out it's a beautiful, clear night and you can see the lights of New York sparkling below on the left. The song playing on my iPod at the time? "Leaving New York" by REM.

...half way and 6 months into a round the world trip, my travelling companion and I were standing in a stairwell, discussing people we didn't much like when we'd been at Teesside Polytechnic together (almost a year previously). Boring Norman was being analysed with much mirth, when, of course, he walked up the steps. "'ello lads! Fancy meeting you here". It was, to say the least, bizarre.

One more, also related to student days - I hired a tux, picked from hundreds at a local suit hire, for a pre-exam party. Splendid time and all that, but I mislay my driver's license at some point in the night. Some many months, and a new DL later, I have cause to hire another tux, and during that evening, in the inside breast pocket...

This happened about a minute ago.

I'm secretly plotting to take the FPO to Vegas for a weekend in February, and have, even as I type, the Bellagio's website open in another tab. I had just got onto their site and was starting to browse the room prices when BBC News - which I have on in the background - started to run a story about an attempted robbery. At the Bellagio.

That was a bit weird.

When she was a fresh-faced art student at Kingston Poly , my GLW was approached by a third year doing her "finals" project which was illustrating classic novels. The GLW "sat" as Tess of the D"Ubervilles. She was photographed and subsequently painted.
A couple of years later she did work experience at Penguin books. The job she was given was to lay out the cover of a new edition of the children's "classic", Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm. And the illustration she was given to use? Why, of course, it was her as Tess, But with a straw hat. And plaits.

Doo de doo doo (That's the Twilight Zone theme, obviously)

In 1990 I moved from a house in Cambridge, England to a house in Auckland, New Zealand.

Same phone number.

In 1988 I started a new job and had decided to leave it after one week. On the Friday (what I thought would be my last day) I attended a Word Perfect training course. I had "If you go down to Willow Farm, to look for butterflies, flutterbyes..." (from Supper's Ready) in my head. As the same time the trainer was showing how to format a letter on WP and then she used as an example address "Willow Farm".

It freaked me out and made me think it an omen so I decided to stay, which was a really good career/life decision.

This spans several years:

1996: I'm introduced to a girl, Dee, at a wedding, who's due to go travelling for a year the following week. I'm particularly interested to talk to her as I'm planning on travelling myself in a year or so's time once I've earned enough. The evening ends with a jokey 'see you in Bangkok'.

1998: Khao San Road, Bangkok. Who do I bump into? Dee, of course, who seems to have never stopped travelling. We stay in contact for a bit but, after a couple of years, hear no more from one another.

2004: An old school friend of mine who moved to New Zealand several years earlier comes home for Christmas. He invites old friends out for drinks and there, to my astonishment, is Dee. Turns out they'd lived together for a year in Australia.

At this point, I know I should probably say 'reader I married her'. In fact, reader, I married her best mate.

I once read a biography of the band Weezer during a flight from Toronto to London. At a point in the book there is a reference to You Oughtta Know hitmaker Alanis Morrissette, and how she'd been a teen popstar several years earlier, before reinventing herself as a rock chick. I'd not known this before, but as I briefly looked up between turning to the next page, what should be on the in-flight TV screen but an early video of said Canadian songstress from her teen pop days.

I have worked with Stewart for over a decade but it was only a couple of weeks ago that we found out we both got married on the same day ...

Twenty four years ago at 11am on the same High Street in a village in Hampshire, both of us now live and work far from there at different ends of the country.

He was at the CoE, I was at the RC but he distinctly remembers one of my mates turning up at the wrong church with a gift wrapped garden spade and fork (as you do).

I mentioned the name of the lost wedding guest and we worked out that the same chap has subsequently married one of Stewart's GLW's best friends who was at their wedding but didn't meet my mate until a decade later.

In October 2004 the Liverpool Biennial, its bi-yearly splurge of artiness was in full swing, and I took a day off to have a mooch and then go see The Finn Brothers at the Empire in the evening.
Down near the old docks there are warehouses which had lately been turned by the art mob into (ahem) spaces, displaying some of the wilder stuff. I have already been shaken up by a video installation showing mad folk in South America whipping themselves and indeed getting themselves crucified in a state of religious frenzy.

So it was with some relief that I went to the next gallery showing some gentler , more decorative arts, and happy to encounter six 1-inch x 1-inch Plastic Of Paris painted squares, each displaying one of the first six albums by The Fall (Live From The Witch Trials, Dragnet, Grotesque, etc. ). Ah yes, happy days listening to Peel...

As I was walking away my mobile phone buzzed. Check the messages, one from my brother. It read "John Peel is toast".

It was all I could do not to completely freak out. Had to leave, and wandered Liverpool in a daze.

I used to make regular visits to the East African nation of Eritrea. While I was there I made friends with a Swedish chap who owned what was probably the only pair of rollerblades in the country and who was constantly being chased by packs of children who were in awe of this gliding form of wheeled transportation. He introduced me to an Englishman called Chris who was overseeing a coastal engineering project.

A couple of weeks after I had met them I relocated to another part of the country where I spent a weekend up a mountain getting my head together. A couple of days later I descended back towards a winding road devoid of any signs of human life, hoping that I would be able to flag down a lift, as I had completely exhausted my water supply.

The moment that my feet touched the asphalt a pick-up truck pulled up alongside me. Chris stuck his head out of the window.

"Alright Southend. Get in," he said.

I slung my bag into the back and off we went.

In the book (not any of the films) the hero Richard Hannay returns from Scotland by train. He's on his way to Berkshire and has to change at Crewe and make his way to Reading.

I read this passage on a train pulling into Crewe to change trains and make my way to Reading.

There was a thread active here some months ago that I read with interest. To do with humorous prose writers. SJ Perelman was mentioned freely, along with how difficult it can be to find his writings in print in the UK.

The volume recommended to the OP was 'The Most of SJ Perelman' - as a sort of Holy Grail to be ordered online or hunted down second hand.

Leaving work that day I passed the second hand book market under Waterloo Bridge and saw on display a pristine copy of 'The Most of SJ Perelman'. As easy as falling off me bike. It was mine only £3 later.

...but anyway.

Once, a long time ago, I was sat in Geneva airport waiting for my flight home. To pass the time I was reading a copy of Esquire magazine I'd picked up on the way out.

A small snippet caught my eye - a little 'comment' piece on how the PA system at (yes) Geneva airport preceded its announcements with the first five notes of "How Much is That Doggie in the Window".

As I read the piece, above my head, five tinny notes rang out...

I was thinking of doing a thread on strange coincidences last night and you have beat me to it! What a strange coincidence!

Some years ago I was messing around with an acoustic guitar and harmonica. I managed to come up with the basic structure of a song - chord progression, harmonic riff and so on. All it needed was some lyrics putting to it. I planned to work on it later.

A few days later I popped into the local CD store (it must be some time ago, then!), spotted a copy of Mazzy Star's Amongst My Swan and bought it. I then popped it into my Discman and wandered around town listening to it. When the second track, Flowers Of December, came on I stopped dead in my tracks. It was that song I'd been working on earlier - the same chord sequence, key, tempo and harmonica riff.

Patrick, I have been trying to track down and remember who wrote those books for years due to my own abiding love for them - thank you for my very own coincidence!

..i`d ordered the Steve kilbey (lead singer of The Church) biography from Amazon...It`s called "No certainty attached". It arrived, I ripped opened the jiffy bag and at the same time my ipod shuffle played......wait for it, wait for it....a track by The Church called "No certainty attached".

And the name of Steve Kilbeys record label.....Karmic Hit.

I work with two people who both separately know my wife's Uncle and cousins. Considering I work in London and the said Uncle and cousins live in the West Country I think that's definitely befitting the small world tag.

I was in Singapore once, a last minute trip and who should I bump into as I was walking down the street? My dad, who also was on a last minute work trip. Neither of us had spoken to each other for a few weeks and neither of us knew the other would be there.

Just have to say how much I've been enjoying this thread! There are some amazing stories on here, and it's been a real pleasure to read!

Gave a lecture at a university and was taken to local pub by some students. They find a snug and chat after a minute or so the student facing Mr Ginsberg points to wall behind him and chuckles . Ginsberg turns around and sees written on the wall the graffito "allen ginsburg was here" written long before. His face drops and he is convinced the students wrote it but they did not.. pure coincidence. True Story.

I was recently contacted through Friends Reunited by a chap that I worked with thirty years ago.Graham is twenty or so years older than me and retired now.Anyway yesterday we got together for a coffee. During the course of our conversation it transpired that when he was a boy he had a Saturday job helping the local milkman who at that time had a pull along electric milk float which Graham used to ride on between deliveries. One morning as the milkman was swinging the float around a corner young Graham slipped off and as he fell one of his feet was run over by the float which I understand stung a bit.
In fact he still has some problems with that foot today. The point of the story is that the milkman in question was my father amd some years later when I was the same sort of age I can remember riding on the float in the same way although I never fell off I'm glad to say.
Bizrrely in all the time we worked together this story never came up. I guess the appropriate subject never came up and the links were never made.

Several years ago some friends had some Australian relations over to stay. We met them a couple of times whilst they were over here and they returned home. A couple of years later we were returning from a holiday in Singapore and I was sat having a drink in the airport whilst the FPO was looking in the shops.
In the distance I see a guy wearing a Hull FC shirt which I think is a bit of a coincidence as I am from Hull. As he gets closer I realise it our friend's cousin who it transpires is on his way from Australia to France for a wine tasting freebie. His flight had been delayed too but it just seemed to be so strange to cross paths like that.