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Tiny one, and maybe not even that coincidental!

There's a secondment post come up at work that my line manager thinks I ought to apply for. Today I had pulled up the supporting statement I wrote for my present role with the intention of modifying it for the new application. It was addressed to the guy who used to be in charge of Technical Services in the building; he appointed me, but then got seconded to the building next door, and that has become a permanent job. I was therefore amused when upon deleting his name on my computer screen, the man himself turned up in person to talk to the contractor working at the back of the lab!
 
I was on a zoom meeting call just after lunch today, when one of my colleagues randomly asked me what my favourite hymn is (she probably spotted the small cross I wear around my neck)

I’m not overtly religious, but I said if I had to choose one it would be the FA Cup final hymn abide with me.

40 minutes later I left home to pick my son up from school, and as I got closer to the school gates I could hear all the children singing in the playground....you can probably guess what……yes abide with me.

They were practising for their end of term concert.

Funny little coincidence eh.

It made me feel a little emotional to be honest, but I don't know why.
 
I was on a zoom meeting call just after lunch today, when one of my colleagues randomly asked me what my favourite hymn is (she probably spotted the small cross I wear around my neck)

I’m not overtly religious, but I said if I had to choose one it would be the FA Cup final hymn abide with me.

40 minutes later I left home to pick my son up from school, and as I got closer to the school gates I could hear all the children singing in the playground....you can probably guess what……yes abide with me.

They were practising for their end of term concert.

Funny little coincidence eh.

It made me feel a little emotional to be honest, but I don't know why.
Reminds me of a little coincidence I posted about on page 14 of this very thread -

T'other day for some reason I was singing 'Steal Away' to myself. The 'spiritual', which I was taught to sing at school. It starts 'Steal away, steal away to Jesus...'

Dunno why but it stayed with me all day and into yesterday morning. It came into my head again as we cycled along the canal and passed some boats, one of which was named 'Steelaway'.
(They often have contrived names.)

Made me wonder a bit!
 
And I am left wondering why any hymn would advocate stealing away to Jesus when stealing is a sin.
:p
 
And I am left wondering why any hymn would advocate stealing away to Jesus when stealing is a sin.
:p
Stealing away means leaving somewhere quietly or secretively. The song is a Spiritual. In the context of the song stealing away to Jesus represents leaving behind the misery of slavery by dying.*

It's now known that Spirituals also expressed ideas about escaping slavery by absconding either alone or with organised help.

Of course, under slavery a person stealing away in any form was depriving their owner of property and so literally committing theft.

*Learning this in a school music lesson as a teenager, I was shocked to think those people's lives could be so hard they'd welcome a natural if premature death. Nobody else in class seemed interested but it blew my mind.
 
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I have always had an interest in nautical history and had a rather strange thing happen one day a couple of years ago whilst walking my dog through a small park near me. I was walking along a path and saw a man coming towards me pushing a bicycle. When we got level he said hello and asked me if I knew the name of the Argentine navy cruiser which was sunk by a Royal navy sub during the Falklands conflict? I told him it was the General Belgrano and he thanked me -he said he had been trying to think of it for some time - he then just carried on walking.

The park was busy and he passed a couple of people before he got to me without stopping to ask them anything as far as I was aware. It wasn't as if it was an anniversary of the event or recent either , maybe 38 or 39 years on from the conflict. Maybe he goes out every day with an obscure question to ask? I never saw him after then though, even though I used to walk there quite often waiting for my wife to finish work.
 
When we got level he said hello and asked me if I knew the name of the Argentine navy cruiser which was sunk by a Royal navy sub during the Falklands conflict? I told him it was the General Belgrano and he thanked me -he said he had been trying to think of it for some time - he then just carried on walking.
...Maybe he goes out every day with an obscure question to ask? I never saw him after then though, even though I used to walk there quite often waiting for my wife to finish work.
I met a bloke like that once in a coffee shop in Keswick (Lake District, England).

I was sitting with my wife when a man sitting alone at the next table suddenly turned round and asked me if I could complete the lyric, "She broke the needle and she can sew..."

I answered, "I'll show you how to walk the dog," which he conceded was was close enough, being the right song but the wrong line of the lyric.

He followed up by asking me who had recorded the song first. I made a wild guess at Howlin' Wolf and he was very pleased to be able to correct me: it was Rufus Thomas.

Apparently satisfied with his victory, he turned away and said no more.
 
I have always had an interest in nautical history and had a rather strange thing happen one day a couple of years ago whilst walking my dog through a small park near me. I was walking along a path and saw a man coming towards me pushing a bicycle. When we got level he said hello and asked me if I knew the name of the Argentine navy cruiser which was sunk by a Royal navy sub during the Falklands conflict? I told him it was the General Belgrano and he thanked me -he said he had been trying to think of it for some time - he then just carried on walking.

The park was busy and he passed a couple of people before he got to me without stopping to ask them anything as far as I was aware. It wasn't as if it was an anniversary of the event or recent either , maybe 38 or 39 years on from the conflict. Maybe he goes out every day with an obscure question to ask? I never saw him after then though, even though I used to walk there quite often waiting for my wife to finish work.
He may have thought you look of an age to remember the incident as it was notorious and controversial at the time.
So - without Googling, can you recall what the Sun's headline about it was?
 
I have always had an interest in nautical history and had a rather strange thing happen one day a couple of years ago whilst walking my dog through a small park near me. I was walking along a path and saw a man coming towards me pushing a bicycle. When we got level he said hello and asked me if I knew the name of the Argentine navy cruiser which was sunk by a Royal navy sub during the Falklands conflict? I told him it was the General Belgrano and he thanked me -he said he had been trying to think of it for some time - he then just carried on walking.

The park was busy and he passed a couple of people before he got to me without stopping to ask them anything as far as I was aware. It wasn't as if it was an anniversary of the event or recent either , maybe 38 or 39 years on from the conflict. Maybe he goes out every day with an obscure question to ask? I never saw him after then though, even though I used to walk there quite often waiting for my wife to finish work.
Maybe he only had one answer to find in that days 'Mail' crossword, and you were the most intellegent looking person he had seen.
 
He may have thought you look of an age to remember the incident as it was notorious and controversial at the time.
So - without Googling, can you recall what the Sun's headline about it was?
I can remember the picture on the front page but not the headline...
 
I do remember The Sun's headline, I just wasn't doing it the service of repeating it. Bernard Manning I did not follow too closely. Probably for the best.
Same here, the headline hit just the right note of crass, Jeremy Kyle-ish type crudity.
 
Maybe he was just the sort of person who asks random questions as they come into his mind. It's sometimes like that in the shop - something will be playing on Co Operative Radio (don't ask about UnCo operative Radio, they rarely play music) and one customer will ask 'Who recorded this, again?' The whole floor will come to a standstill as everyone listens, then someone will answer, and then someone else chimes in with 'Do you know which album it came from?' Someone else will reply, be corrected, then someone else asks if you know what year it came out.... and so on and so on. Hours of amusement.
 
Now this one is really rather strange.
I have never been a fan of the group "Simply Red". Okay they have had a handful of (IMO) 'okay' songs but nothing to really write home about.
But about an hour ago, while washing some dishes, the song 'A new flame' came into my head for no apparent reason.
No radio on or anything like that for me to hear it, even from outside from a neighbours etc.
It just popped into my head randomly.
Anyways......FFWD to just 5 minutes ago, I have moved into my 'front room' and sat at my PC as per usual, and checked my email, looked at the news, checked a couple of my favourite sites (including here, natch) and then scrolled down my 'facebook' page to see what my contacts have posted.
Well I'll go to the foot of our stairs.......A friend of mine in Australia, just 15 minutes ago, has posted this....
"Flashback to 1989 and a great song by one of my favourite bands, Simply Red
LOVE this song!
❤
"
 
Re: your Simply Red post above, Trev, these kind of mind-bending music-related coincidences have happened to me quite often over the years, and often relating to sleep/dreams. I am quite oriented towards chart music ranging from the Sixties to the Noughties, which is quite a broad area of interest, so that might be a significant factor. Two of the more remarkable ones follow. They both made my brain do somersaults in my skull.

First story : Around 1994, I was on holiday on Guernsey in the Channel Islands. I woke up in my holiday apartment having just had a strikingly vivid (and rather amusing) dream that myself and my partner were on a stage doing karaoke (something neither of us has ever done - really not out style. Never even been to anywhere where karaoke was happening). The song we were performing was "Dead Ringer For Love", the 1981 duet by Meat Loaf and Cher. In the dream, we were doing a great job of it, remembering all the lyrics and giving a real show-stopping performance to a very enthusiastic audience. The funniest bit was that we were dressed up in full costume, me as Mr Loaf and my partner in full drag (he would never wear drag!!) as the former Mrs Bono. I have to say I have always liked the song, and would call myself a bit of a Meat Loaf fan. I like Cher too. I woke from the dream thinking "Wow, that was weird! But fun!" It had been so vivid. There was no evidence of a radio playing out in the street or anything like that when I woke up in the peace and quiet of the bedroom. Over breakfast I told my partner about the dream. The weird coincidence came about an hour later. Having booked a boat trip to the island of Sark that day, we decided we had better buy ourselves a couple of light waterproof jackets. In the town (St Peter Port) we found a shop selling that kind of stuff. We walked through the door and there was a radio blasting out "Dead Ringer For Love" - ok, you guessed that - and my brain went pop! as the dream flooded back into my mind. It wasn't as if it was a current hit or anything.

The other one came from only a few years ago. A couple of weeks before Christmas, I woke early in the morning (about 5.30 am) with a song playing in my head like it was a radio. It was perfectly clear, and I kind of recognised it but I couldn't think what it was or why it was in my head. I lay awake with it echoing in my head, and I eventually realised it was the then-current Christmas single by Robbie Williams (called something like 'This Christmas') -** SEE POST SCRIPT BELOW ** which I had heard a few times but I had no idea how or why it had lodged in my brain like that. I went back to sleep and woke up a couple of hours later with another song in my head. Again it was as clear as a bell. It took me a few moments to pin it down. Another Christmas song which I wasn't too familiar with, from a few years earlier this time. It was "It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas" by the Pet Shop Boys. And again, no clear idea why a song I didn't really know very well at all was clanging around in my skull like it was a radio. Shortly after I woke up, my partner got up to make a cup of tea. I rolled over and clicked the radio on, just in time to catch the last 30 seconds of "This Christmas" by Robbie Williams!! I lay there thinking "that is weird!" as Radio 2's Ken Bruce burbled on for a few minutes, someone else did the traffic report, then Ken announced the next song... "... and here's the Pet Shop Boys with "It Doesn't Often Snow At Christmas".... Obviously it was the run-up to Christmas, so you get Christmas songs on the radio - and in your head - but those two songs?? Songs I was hardly really aware of? In my head while I was asleep? And the was no radio on anywhere in the vicinity.

I have had many similar music-related examples of coincidences over the years, but those two instances really did make me sit up and wonder.

** POST SCRIPT: I just did the research - better late than never - and discovered that the Robbie Williams song was actually called 'Time For Change' and was released in November 2019. It has a chorus which is very catchy, and VERY jingly-Christmassy, which could explain why it had got itself wedged into my cranium so easily after just a couple of hearings!
 
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Or as he's known to his friends....'Meat'.
LOL.

Yeah I think (or at least it seems like) it is quite common to be thinking of a particular track only for to turn on the radio a short while later and that track to be playing. I have definitely have it happen on many occasions, not that I could remember particular ones to be able to go into detailed description, but I know it happens more frequently than you would expect.
 
Actually his friends probably call him 'Mike'.
 
The random questions thing reminds me of something that happened to me a while back.
I had just gotten off a bus, in a residential area but near a busy commercial street, and was on my way to a nearby supermarket when a lady I didn't know stopped me to ask if I knew a good entertainment lawyer. The neighborhood is not known for folks in the entertainment business. Of course, she had no way of knowing that I had a bit more knowledge of entertainment law than the average person, having made a film with some friends that we once hoped would have commercial viability, and having taught media literacy at the university I worked for.

There used to be a woman who hung out at Penn Station in NYC who asked everyone she met their name, nationality (ethnicity) and one other thing. (Was it age? Occupation?) She never seemed interested in conversation beyond her three questions.
 
One small and odd one. Looked out of the bus window today while travelling, to see a digital clock in an office display click over to 17:43:21. it occured to me that this is also 5-4-3-2-1. Logically this must come up twice a day on a digital display, but how many people are there to notice it at a quarter to six in the morning?(and how many other chains of consequetive numbers are possible?)
 
One small and odd one. Looked out of the bus window today while travelling, to see a digital clock in an office display click over to 17:43:21. it occured to me that this is also 5-4-3-2-1. Logically this must come up twice a day on a digital display, but how many people are there to notice it at a quarter to six in the morning?(and how many other chains of consequetive numbers are possible?)
 
One small and odd one. Looked out of the bus window today while travelling, to see a digital clock in an office display click over to 17:43:21. it occured to me that this is also 5-4-3-2-1. Logically this must come up twice a day on a digital display, but how many people are there to notice it at a quarter to six in the morning?(and how many other chains of consequetive numbers are possible?)
Not many 12:34.56, 01:23.45, 02:34.56
 
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