• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Coincidences

Another book coincidence!

I acquired Peter Underwood's 'Gazetteer Of Scottish & Irish Ghosts' yesterday and was reading it in between chatting, watching TV and looking at the 'net.

I bought a Benjamin Zephania CD yesterday too and looked him up on the 'net, and found a photo of him at Mary Shelley's grave.
'Wow', I said to the BF, 'my son's been there, it's in, er, Bournemouth'.

When I went back to reading the book, I found that the old postcard I'd been using as a bookmark was from.... Bournemouth!!

Later I was reading while glancing up at the 'FBI Files' on TV. Just at the point where a missing girl's body was discovered on TV, I read a passage about someone discovering the skeleton of a young girl in an Egyptian tomb! The two incidents were described almost identically.

(Worse, the chapter in the book was about 'The Bone' which was taken from the tomb and caused supernatural mayhem thereafter. Whooooooooo!)
 
Coincidence probably.. Or is it?

Ok, I don't normally post experiences in here, but here goes..

A couple of days ago I was copying a number of files from my Pee Cee to a portable storage device. Whilst waiting it to finish I decided to doodle a devils pentagram (upside down pentagram with goaty inside) on my newspaper.

Not a devilworshipper or anything. Lord knows why I decided to draw that particular image.

Anyway, once the job was complete I checked the total size of all the copied files.

66.6 meg (!)


BBbbrrrr..
 
Coinkydinks

In one week I found out that I was 1/2 Irish, heard the song 'When Irish Eyes are Smiling' on the radio twice, saw a porcelain doll advertised in a magazine that plays "When Irish Eyes are Smiling', was BOUGHT the doll and was the bought a green mobile phone. When I turned it on, the ringtone was 'When Irish Eyes are Smiling'.
 
A man I'd never met before came with a friend to my birthday party, and as he was Scottish, I told him my sister married a Scotsman, and told him the surname. She went pale, and he said "Not David ****?! I've been looking for him!" (He owes a lot of people a lot of money). Turned out he only wanted him for their school reunion though. Phew.

I work in a call centre, and one day last year, had consequetive calls concerning houses next door to each other (and we cover the whole of England and Wales)
 
A couple of days before The Virgin Queen started off the Elizabethan thread I established contact with an old school friend called Elizabeth. A couple of days afterwards, I was invited to an Elizabethan banquet at Lumley Castle.
 
The same day I joined this message board, another with the handle Ånubis joined it.
 
Shopping

not especially weird but perhaps interesting

I had been meaning to buy a teapot for someone for ages. There were two preferable requisites: 1) that it was big, and 2) that it was made out of tin although I would TBH have settled for any teapot.
Anyway the other day i decided to actually buy one, and to my mild suprise, A very large tin tea pot sat there in the first charity shop i went in - i bought it.

I asked my mum, and she claims that if she is out buying things in charity shops, if she knows what she is going to buy, she "always" finds it right away.

Anyone else noticed this effect?
 
A few weeks ago, my great neice giggled at the sight of a turtle footstool on a 1970's sitcom, so I decided to buy her one for her first birthday but didn't have any idea where I could find one. The first charity shop I visited...

(She burst into tears when she saw it so it's been rehomed on top of my wardrobe.)

Jane.
 
A couple of days ago I was looking at the poleshift site, one of the rivals of FT in the Webby awards, which set me off thinking about the first 'comet smacking into the earth story' I read year's ago, which was Denis Wheatley's 'Sixty Days to Live' and his other SF novel 'Star of Ill Omen' in which the UFOs are crewed by giant bees from Mars (they belonged to my Dad, copies long since sent to a jumble sale).

Most of his stuff has been out of print for years, which is a pity since I thought I'd like to see how they stood up.

I went into the market in St Ives this lunchtime and on the secondhand book-stall both books were at the front of a box, on the front of the stall - original 60s paperbacks in quite good condition. Bought them.

I've not seen any Dennis Wheatley books, apart from the odd copy of the 'Devil Rides Out' for a very long time.

The library fairy (or angel) phenomenom strikes again.
 
As it happened I visited my local charity shop today. I wasn't looking for anything in particular, but I made 2 good finds

- a hardback copy of Boswell's Life of Sam Johnson, illustrated, in as new condition (doesn't seem to have been read), and

- "Are We Alone? Implications of the discovery of extraterrestrial life", by Paul Davies, Penguin paperback.

Both for 50p! :)
 
This happened to me too for a while. Always with books. I would think "I'm going to go in there and pick up a copy of (X)." And I would! And the (X) wasn't a copy of Jaws by Peter Benchley or The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven, or whatever. It would be something fairly obscure.

I noticed this stopped however when I handed over a pile of my old books to the shop. During my next visit, while scanning the spines, I would notice one of my ex-books tucked in there. Somehow I knew this was a bad book-buying omen (perhaps viewing the book in this manner on my own shelf for so long caused my psychic wires to cross, as it were).

I haven't had much luck since. I think I'll have to start searching further afield.
 
I found a few interesting books in a shop recently...including The Mechanics of Flight, marked as the property of the base commander at HMS (as it was then) Condor in Arbroath...
 
There was a time when Charity Shops appeared to have their bookstock
well picked over by local dealers before it hit the shelves. The result was
usually a mouldy selection of unsaleable junk in the shop. These days there
are few local dealers left so the book sections often contain some real
bargains. That's my rational take on recent lucky finds.

But I'm going to test the thinking-and-finding system by concentrating on
a nice box full of Shakespeare manuscripts. :p
 
i ahve to oposite ... somthing is everywhere and by the time i need it its long gone.. today i was loking for one of them dogs/horses that is made of beads and flops about when u dipress the base.... can i find one..not in any crap tourist shop in Cornwall!
 
I once found a box of FT back issues on a high shelf in one of those really disorganised bookshops. There was a cat in the box as well, which I had to remove. :) And some of these FTs were pretty old, earliest one was number 30. They have a new home in my bookcase.
 
James Whitehead said:
But I'm going to test the thinking-and-finding system by concentrating on
a nice box full of Shakespeare manuscripts. :p
Click to expand...

Maybe you'll find out who really wrote them...:eek:
 
sidecar_jon said:
i ahve to oposite ... somthing is everywhere and by the time i need it its long gone..
Click to expand...
And I have the opposite of that! When I really want something, there are none to be found. By the time I've gone off the idea six months later, they're in all the shops...
 
I was going to a wedding years ago and since I live in jeans/leggings/t-shirts I literally didn't have anything to wear for it, I ordered a "dress" from a catalogue [it looks like a navy jacket over a grey skirt], I wanted navy gloves, grey or navy shoes and a bag to match. Now my home town wasn't exactly cosmopolitan in them days I could've gotten a nice flannel shirt and wellies, but girlie stuff for a wedding?? To my utter astonishment the shoe shop not only had a pair of grey shoes and a matching handbag, they also had navy gloves! Apparently they were prepared for anything in that shoe shop!
 
Leafing casually through a bound volume of The Unexplained, it
fell open on an article about Coincidences. I read a section about
Rebecca West.

The piece told of how she had faced a seemingly impossible task of
locating a particular piece of information. Pulling a volume off the
shelf at random, the book opened at the exact page she needed.

I looked at her photograph and thought how unusually smiling and
happy she looked, for an author. Then I remembered a quote I had
often used that she told people she wrote in order to find out what
she had been thinking. It seemed she was now somewhat out of
fashion and I resolved to find out a bit more about her one day.

Move forward three hours and I am channel-hopping through the
Freeview box and find a book discussion on Radio Four. They are
discussing The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West! :eek:

My notebook of synchronicities starts here.
 
Recently I have been looking into voodoo (or 'vodou' as it's correctly called) as part of my course. There's lots to see on the 'net and the last thing I looked at was the tattoo some vodouians have which features several crosses.

An hour later the BF was channel-hopping and I glanced up to see the exact design I'd seen earlier. He'd found a prog about New Orleans and the Voodoo Queen.

Brrr.
 
driving test

Just been looking through this thread and thought it deserved a resurrection so here's my effort:

Most annoying co-incidence I've ever had is when I was 18 and had just (sob) failed my driving test. My mum opened the door upon hearing my car pull up and was all congratulating smiles. Of course I told her I'd failed so she retired into the kitchen to make me a cup of tea (gawd bless her).
As you can expect I was feeling pretty down so I switched on the box and flicked to M:TV, thinking some music would cheer me up. Those who've watched MTV will know that they have 'theme' weekends (at least they did when I was 18), these themes denote the songs they play over the weekend.
The theme for this weekend was CARS. After a few songs (I can remember Madness and Grace Jones) I felt dog-sick and went upstairs.

How's about that for fate giving you a slap in the face?
 
My wee brother died and for reasons I wont go into I lost touch with his sons .Mark(who is my godson) and william his big brother.It was my birthday and i was out drinking pissed in fact I got home and i was crying my eyes out thinking about him I was saying I miss you pal and cmone let me know your alright.
Fell asleep on the couch.The door bell woke me up.When I answered it my nephew mark was standing there.I had not seen him for easy 8 years.He said he thought it was time to get in touch with his dads side of the family.Hows that for a coincidence?:nonplus:
 
I recently joined a new gym and a woman there recognised me from when I'd had a summer job in the factory where she was a supervisor- 25 years ago! I didn't know her at all but was pleased that I'd made an impression.

I started thinking about that job and remembered a lovely girl I'd met there, who'd gone on to Cambridge to read Classics.
I could only remember her rather unusual surname, strangely enough. Next day at the hospital I looked after a gentleman with the same surname, who turned out to be that girl's father!

(He called her 'Ramona', and I instantly remembered that she'd been embarrassed about her forename, as had I, and we had spent our lunch breaks together trying to think up dignified new names for ourselves. She settled on 'Rebecca', I now recalled.)
 
So many to choose from...

About 10 years ago I was driving along and I pressed eject on the tape player (it was tape back then) but the song just carried on. I couldn't understand it until I realised I was now listening to the radio, which was playing the same song at exactly the same time (and I mean exactly, to the fraction of a second). Which was quite a coincidence in itself apart from the exact same thing happened about a month later, half a mile down the same street. Different song, though (and OK, this time it was just slightly out of synch).
 
And another (I'm supposed to be working but what the hell):-

More recent this time. About 4 years ago I was lucky enough to win 5 numbers on the National Lottery, getting me £2.2K (I think that chances are 50,000:1 or something). Of course, everyone at work was amazed until a few weeks later the guy on the next desk won - 5 numbers again. The month after that the guy on the desk behind him won as well. With 5 numbers.

We only bought 1 or 2 tickets each Saturday, so it wasn't like we spent thousands. I don't know what the chances against this are but they must be pretty steep.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top