Last night I was in a pub in Poplar after having seen the video my friend Sok had made for her college media course (excellent by the way) when someone said “You should talk to Bob over there. He’s from Cheshire like you are”.
So I did. “Where are you from?”, “Winsford”, “You?”, “Barnton, but my brother went to school in Winsford”, “How old is your brother?”, “53”, “Same as me. What’s his name?”, “Paul”. Cue slightly stunned silence. Turns out his brother was in the same year as me at school. I could just about put a face to the name but some of his brother’s school friends were in my circle of friends too.
Yet another of those ‘small world’ situations which crop up without warning every now and then and which we always treat as amazing coincidences although they probably aren’t really. The strangest I can remember occurred some years ago in the school staff room when two people, English and Australian, were idly chatting one lunch time and began to realise that they had a number of friends in common. Even odder, it turned out that their sisters lived next door to each other in Australia. I don’t know what the chances of that happening are but they must surely be pretty small and certainly smaller than last night’s.
Posted 17 June 2004, 19:52 BST
