Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer

Author:Martin Plimmer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

3

FANCY MEETING YOU HERE

It’s not just a small world. It’s a small world with billions of people in it. At the time of writing this sentence there were, according to the Internet World Population Clock, 6,385,725,918 people living on this planet (assuming you are reading this on Earth). That number will have grown considerably by the time you read this. Little wonder that we keep bumping into each other!

To further understand the nature of these kinds of coincidences we must also factor in the theory of “six points of separation.” First imagine a very, very large field. Into this field we place all the people we know. We then add all the people that those people know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know, plus all the people they know.

That, according to the theory, would be all the people in the world, including Himalayan hermits and Aborigines on walkabout in the Australian outback. Just try it if you don’t believe us.

Maybe the truly surprising thing is that in such a small, densely populated world, amazing chance encounters don’t happen more often. Perhaps Peter Cook and Dudley Moore had it right in this comic sketch:

PETER: Hello.

DUDLEY: Hello.

PETER: How are you?

DUDLEY: I’m terribly well. How are you?

PETER: I’m terribly well as well.

DUDLEY: I must say you are looking very fit.

PETER: I’m feeling pretty fit actually. Isn’t it amazing—us just bumping into each other like this?

DUDLEY: Yes. I mean here of all places.

PETER: Here of all places! I mean, I haven’t seen you since, er …

DUDLEY: Now, er … hold on a minute … er, when was it? Er … we, we haven’t seen each other …

PETER: Well actually we haven’t seen each other.…

DUDLEY: We haven’t seen each other … er … before.

PETER: That’s right. We’ve never seen each other before, have we?

DUDLEY: No.

PETER: You’ve never seen me.

DUDLEY: And I’ve never seen you. What a small world.

PETER: What a small world!

Here’s a selection of extraordinary chance encounters between people who, unlike Pete and Dud, were in fact connected.

FAR AWAY AROUND THE CORNER

Nellie Richardson said good-bye to her brother Joseph in the early 1940s and didn’t see him again for more than half a century. Joseph was then a teenager, enlisting in the navy.

Nellie grew old and gave up hope of ever seeing him again, but one day, sitting in her nursing home, she was galvanized by the sight of a seventy-nine-year-old man on the other side of the room. She knew immediately it was Joe.

Perhaps as incredible as the meeting was the fact that their paths had traveled so close to each other but failed to connect for so long. At the time they met, Joe had been living in the nursing home for six months, and for decades before that the brother and sister had been living barely a mile apart in the same city.

Both had a fifty-five-year-old daughter named Sandra.

MARCIA AND PETER MEET AGAIN

Peter and Jean and Paul and Marcia

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.