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zygmunt_rocks_on

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Aug 19, 2001
Messages
273
I had a bit of an odd experience involving cars last sunday. How often do you see a silver Ford Sierra these days? They're pretty rare in London, anyway. Me and Mrs Zyg were riding on my motorcycle through London's Smithfield market, where I saw three identical ones at different times on the same short stretch of road, all with three passengers (the road's the one that winds round the market from Farringdon road to the Barbican underpass, if anyone knows it). I followed one that peeled off up St John Street, one was parked with it's nose sticking out of the covered square between the markets, then one appeared from a side road and went up Charterhouse square. There's no way it could have been the same car. Could have been a rusty-silver-ford-sierra-apprciation-society meeting or something?
 
Some strange coincidences have been happening to me since January.

I have been trying to sell up and move since January 2003 and finally January this year we had an offer and the ball began rolling. I live on a road where houses come up for sale few and far between. Now since January these things have happened:

1. Number 7 have put on the market and sold their house after a series of break ins and car thefts (only their house and car were targeted).
2. Number 9 took ill and has had to be moved to a nursing home and her son is dying so her house is up for sale.
3. Number 17's wife was taken into a nursing home and then he died a month later of a brain tumour so their house is up for sale.
4. Number 15 all three family members have been hospitalised with pneumonia and this morning the dad.

I live at number 11, so its the two houses either side of me Coincidence? :shock: More than likely but strange none the less.
 
I find it quite strange, Elffriend, very strange indeed.

If you do move, can you keep up with what's going on and see if the pattern continues? Would be interesting to find out.
 
In my buddies high school yearbook about 3 years ago there was a row of kids with 4, and then columns of 5. (You know, like normal yearbooks). But one particualr row was strange because the left-most kid passed away from a disease. And the person to the right of him died in a car accident weeks later. The third kid turned up missing, not sure if he/she was found. Some kids started referring to it as "death row", which was morbid, but still pretty humerous. Your storey reminds me of that.
 
Elffriend, being in the home sales business I'd have to say it's quite common for a certain heighborhood, or area, to have no homes available year after year, and then suddenly one after another are suddenly 'for sale'. Many things operate on a cyclical basis, and so do home sales. Looking over you post, I'd venture a guess that this is a neighborhood populated by older people who have lived in the same house for many, many years, and now that they are ageing, are moving to nursing homes, or smaller, easier to care for places. Quite common in certain rural areas, actually. I often ask if a homeowner would be interested in selling, and they reply "Oh my no, where would we move to?"
 
Elffriend said:
I live at number 11, so its the two houses either side of me Coincidence? :shock: More than likely but strange none the less.

Well, I would say it's a bit ODD :D that 7,9,11,15 and 17 are all up for sale.

Assuming the odd-numbered houses are all on the same side of the street and that 13 is skipped, that means that 5 houses in a row are up for sale simultaneously.

What are the ODDS of that? :D

(Thank you thank you. I'll be here all week.)

But seriously...

My wife once worked in an office building attached to some apartments. One day some gentleman arrived to talk to the building owner about selling. He declined their offer. A couple days later a dumpster behind the building was set on fire by perpetrators unknown, resulting in the temporary eviction of all the apartment residents. A few days later the same gentlemen returned asking again if the owner would like to sell. Again, he declined. A few weeks later, the apartment building was again set on fire, resulting in it's condemnation and eventual sale, presumably the aforementioned interested parties. The building was torn down and replaced by a private parking structure. At the time of the fires, there was suspicion owing to the lack of witnesses in a busy downtown area and the expertise with which the fires were set. The same thing happened in two or three other 'disadvantaged' areas the city wanted to develop.

:shock:

If all the properties, in the long run, end up being owned by some company or investor, then I'd be suspicious. Otherwise, it's probably as the previous poster said: a coincidence arising from buy/sell/people getting old cycles.
 
Elffriend said:
Some strange coincidences have been happening to me since January.

I have been trying to sell up and move since January 2003 and finally January this year we had an offer and the ball began rolling. I live on a road where houses come up for sale few and far between. Now since January these things have happened:

1. Number 7 have put on the market and sold their house after a series of break ins and car thefts (only their house and car were targeted).
2. Number 9 took ill and has had to be moved to a nursing home and her son is dying so her house is up for sale.
3. Number 17's wife was taken into a nursing home and then he died a month later of a brain tumour so their house is up for sale.
4. Number 15 all three family members have been hospitalised with pneumonia and this morning the dad.

I live at number 11, so its the two houses either side of me Coincidence? :shock: More than likely but strange none the less.

No offence but youve just described life in a street, not as exciting as a soap i guess, but things do happen to us normal people too :)

Anthony Clifton said:
Well, I would say it's a bit ODD :D that 7,9,11,15 and 17 are all up for sale.

If your looking to buy and you see this many houses in a row for sale, youll probably have alarm bells in your head telling you there may be a reason and you should listen to them!
 
Totally off topic but i thought it deserved a place in strange coincidences!




In 1981...
Prince Charles got married
Ken and Deirdre got married (Coronation Street)
There was a new Doctor Who
Liverpool finished fifth in the League
Liverpool won 17 league games
Norwich were relegated
Crystal Palace were relegated
Liverpool won the European Cup

In 2005...
Prince Charles got married
Ken and Deirdre got married (Coronation Street)
There was a new Doctor Who
Liverpool finished fifth in the League
Liverpool won 17 league games
Norwich were relegated
Crystal Palace were relegated
LIVERPOOL WON THE EUROPEAN CUP!!!!
 
Nice one, Painy!

Does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.

Julian Barnes
So this is a burp from just decades ago!
 
Talking of coincidences, I've just had one myself.
I was called to work this morning at 4am. Where I had to wait for a van to pick up some parts. To kill time i had a look at this thread and was getting a little impatient about having to wait for the driver at that time in the morning. so I thought to myself " if i go to the toilet i bet the driver turns up" and guess what he did.
not a great coincidence I know but I thought it was all the more funny as i'd been reading this tread just before.
 
I had one the other day that made me actually doubt my sanity. I'd been looking up a particular street on a map because I had to go there the next day. It had a funny name and I couldn't find it at first because I had written it down wrong. Then later on I encountered someone on the internet whose username was the first part of the name of the street (ie, without the "avenue" bit on the end). I thought I was seeing things.
 
To bump an old thread, I've just been to our local car boot sale, was wandering about when the tune 'Young at Heart' (the 80's version by The Bluebells) suddenly popped into my head so I started humming it ... about ten seconds later, I came across a stall selling 'Young at Heart' sheet music sang by Norman Wisdom. I retraced my steps back to the other stalls but didn't spot any books about bluebells or young at heart items .. weird. The very next stall had a Norman Wisdom book on prominent display.
 
Having recently met up with a few old school friends for a drink (I'm 48),I was amazed to find out how many of the Italian boys from our year who are now dead.

There were about 10 in my year at my secondary school. Two have died in seperate car crashes,one from a heart attack,one from suicide and one from cancer.
A very high srike rate considering we could only think of one more person who had died from our year.
 
Here's one. Two long time facebook friends, neither of whom I've actually yet met (yes, I know). One in London one in Sri Lanka.

To use their initals, A and V. Both are miniature sized south asians. That's not a breed of dog. V is coming from Sri Lanka to London in a few weeks for the first time to attend a friend's wedding and then to explore the place on holiday. A is going from London to Sri Lanka this week to..er..attend a friend's wedding and then explore the place on holiday. To be clear they're going in opposite directions to different weddings a few weeks apart. But this mirrored set of correlations was enough for me to try and introduce them on Facebook yesterday. Perhaps the londoner could meet the sri lankan while he's there.

As soon as I do so V, the Sri Lankan, messages me privately on the side to tell me that in fact he's already been told about the arrival of A by someone else...another girl whose wedding he's attending. Yes, same wedding. The Bride is a uni friend of A and a recent acquaintance of V.

Let me underline they have no other or previous connection to each other whatsoever and are living on opposite sides of a world of 7 billion people.

*glances up at the clouds and wonders*
 
One finds that - we reach our 40s and people start dying off.

Hadn't noticed any particular ethnic group among my former friends and colleagues but my goodness, they're dropping like flies. Cancer, heart problems, alcoholism, addictions, overdoses, various diseases, crashes, suicide, the odd murder, all sorts.

I'm now nearly 60 and sometimes feel like the 'last man standing'.

Ran into an old friend and we spent some time recalling who'd died in the last 10 years or so. I'd nursed some in their last days. A couple didn't even recognise me.

48? Wait till you're fifty eight. :(
 
I'm 47 and though i have no idea about the people I went to school with, I've managed to get past the half way point without experiencing many deaths at all. My dad and my nan are the only close family members and were both beyond the average life span, and one short lived (both senses) friend in recent years. That's a grand total of 3 funerals spaced years apart, and the last of those I wouldn't have been expected at.

What's now happening is that my mother (87)'s sisters and inlaws are starting to pop off or line up for dispatch. They'e all in their 70s or 80s. If any of my contemporarily aged friends or siblings were to go I really would be shocked!
 
We had a run of funerals as my nearly 20 or so aunts and uncles and their spouses popped off. That's normal, but there was also the death of a relation in his mid-20s which really did hit hard.
 
I'm not entirely sure I'm contradicting myself as I was only talking about my own experiences of death, but to back up escargot1's observation, now I think about it, until she developed dementia in the last few years it was an almost weekly occurrence for all of my memory that my mum would find someone she used to know or was related to in the death notices of the local paper... I mean this routine stretched back decades. You can imagine this started drying up in later years as pretty much all of her past friends are dead as far as I'm aware, so there would be none left to spot.
 
I could be tempting fate with my comments, coincidence being what it is. Only yesterday I read in that book I was going on about in another thread, how the author found himself sitting in his car reflecting how blessed his life had been, that he had 7 kids and not one of them had died. That night.......
 
Having recently met up with a few old school friends for a drink (I'm 48),I was amazed to find out how many of the Italian boys from our year who are now dead.

There were about 10 in my year at my secondary school. Two have died in seperate car crashes,one from a heart attack,one from suicide and one from cancer.
A very high srike rate considering we could only think of one more person who had died from our year.

A lot of mine have gone gaga, one brain-burned from too many drugs ran out in street with sword, fotunately local cop calmed him down before armed response unit arrived. Another just handling things, and a few delusional people.

A friend fell off a wall while hallucinating, died.

I've suffered from depression myself.

Another friend committed suicide after finding out that he wasn't the father of his "son".

Three in a row: three friends died within a couple of months in 1995.

Four people who worked with me died of cancers within a couple of years.

Too much
 
quick story... in 2009 or 2010, my daughter and son were 9 and 11. they were playing outside. running, approaching a barn and creating a story, talking about this creepy barn was a future machine... (weird story in itself at that age). as they came upon the side of the barn and their story continued back and forth, my daughter said, 'look, there's a bottle on the ground in the mud over there" to which my son replied, 'yeah, that the future juice!' and the walked over to pick it up and the label read "Future Juice". True story. They laughed and brought it to my ex-husband who threw it out, dismissing the story. when the came to my house (we were separated) they told me the story and i pressed hard to see if they were making it up. they assured me it was true and wished their father had kept the bottle. I subsequently looked it up/images online. it only existed in the USA. we are in canada, so not common here. but to this day, my kids ate 14 and 16 and still we get goosebumps about this coincidence.
 
Himself told a joke about Charcot Marie Tooth disease then the next day my aunt who had it died.
 
I made a satirical post on here, drawing on a Blog. about the reasons LPs end up as landfill. Along with derogatory and wicked remarks about the late Mrs Mills and Mantovani, I invented (?) the notion of Fodd, a false Ken Dodd, in imitation of the meme of Faul, the false Paul McCartney.

What turned up the next day but a comment after a Guardian piece - an interview with the latter-day, puffy-faced McCartney - in which the poster remarked sarcastically that "Ken Dodd is looking good!"

The picture is here. You may need to search for the comment.

That poster was not me. I didn't even think they looked similar. :eek:

Coincidences seem to love being connected yet totally inconsequential.
 
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I made a satirical post on here, drawing on a Blog. about the reasons LPs end up as landfill. Along with derogatory and wicked remarks about the late Mrs Mills and Mantovani, I invented (?) the notion of Fodd, a false Ken Dodd, in imitation of the meme of Faul, the false Paul McCartney.

What turned up the next day but a comment after a Guardian piece - an interview with the latter-day, puffy-faced McCartney - in which the poster remarked sarcastically that "Ken Dodd is looking good!"

The picture is here. You may need to search for the comment.

That poster was not me. I didn't even think they looked similar. :eek:

Coincidences seem to love being connected yet totally inconsequential.
Please,don't knock Sir Paul. He's effortlessly cool, and changed the course of rock music,, AND he was a prior guest in a suite at the Grand Canyon I stayed in later, and all I could think about in the shower is that Sir Paul and I stood naked in the same place! Wrap your head around that !!!
 
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