The response to my post about coincidence was amazing...it seems we are all linked in various ways and we all experience this weird mechanism from time to time!
This is a story of one of these startling encounters.
Many years ago I got a job in Rochdale teaching English as a second language to the growing numbers of immigrants in the North West. We were a staff of around 15 at that time. Some of us were part timers...but we had joint meetings at lunch times and all got to know each other quite well.
We enjoyed our work...it was not just Muslims, there were children from Hong Kong, from Brazil and from Iran as well as India and Pakistan.
One of our teachers was not as happy as the rest of us.....she needed to work but not in that particular school. One day she announced that she was leaving...she had got another job.
We were amazed to find that she'd got a job teaching music....she was going to be a peripatetic music teacher, teaching the recorder.
I didn't know she was musical I told her.
"I'm not" she said. "I can't even play the recorder but Ive got six weeks holiday to learn it in."
I was stunned....after she left we didn't meet again....I was moving to North Wales where one of my friends was a violin teacher.
In the pub one night I told her this story about the peripatetic recorder teacher.
She looked at me in amazement. "You are describing my sister in law!"
And I was....we met again that Christmas as she came over for a short stay.
Bearing in mind that Rochdale was at least a hundred miles away I thought it was pretty amazing...and she was still teaching music! But she could by that time play the recorder.
2 comments:
When I went to my Diocesan Panel, one of the Lay Assessors was an Ex-Army Major, who I had known years before in a different place. He had retired and moved to Canterbury and is involved heavily in the local church there. He was a trained interrogator. He had recognised my name on the list of those coming from the Panel, and excused himself from interviewing me. We had great crack, remembering days of yore. I also enjoyed telling the other candidates about his interrogation skills and they if he shone a bright light in their face to beware.
Great fun and it's surprising where you meet people. One year on the Isle of Wight, we met someone we hadn't seen for years, who by coincidence were on holiday there at the same time as us. They'd moved away and we'd lost contact.
I have a story too. Why is that no surprise?
I spent the years from May 1955 to May 1958 in the WRAC.
A year after I'd rejoined the outside world I went for my first ever flight (a holiday in the Isle of Man).
Walking down the street in Douglas I was amazed to be hailed by a Geordie girl I'd been billeted with for about 2 weeks, some two years earlier.
Neither of us had ever flown before or been to the Isle of Man.
A small world indeed.
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