Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

On an evening in November 1992 I was chatting with Ray and Jill Ferrer at their home near Bourne, Lincs. I mentioned that a chap who had recently joined my team at work, Ian Harvey, was an ex-Naval helicopter pilot and had previously worked alongside Prince Andrew. As I mentioned the Prince’s name an item about him appeared on the local TV news that they had playing in the background. ... ... ... In October 2003 I found myself thinking back 11 years to Ian Harvey, who had also said that Prince Andrew was known as ´ H ´. Later that day I spoke to a boy walking a puppy. It turned out he was a friend of a family called Murphy who lived in the next street to us, in the urbanisation Amapolas 3 in Playa Flamenca. He said that his name was Andrew and that the dog was called ´H´.

Example 65 in Coincidences is centred around a 3 move queen sacrifice sequence overlooked in the 1999 game Daly Vs Rochev but executed by John Travolta in the 1996 film, Phenomenon . At a Birmingham team match weekend in March 2003 I spotted Yuri Rochev, whom I had never before encountered, and silently handed him a gift copy of my book. There were 3 young, titled Irish players named Quinn, Kelly and, in my opinion the most talented, Sam Collins. Three quintessentially Irish names, so much so that it had occurred to me that you only really needed a Murphy to complete the set! In May 2003 I met Rochev again at the same venue and we briefly discussed the book. He said that he had actually noted the queen sacrifice that he could have played in his game at an earlier moment, looming as a future possibility, but when the moment came to actually do it... he had forgotten and played a prosaic winning move instead! On August 29th 2003 I got an e mail from a man signing himself Niall Murphy an...

On November 3rd 2003 this e mail arrived - James, I read your book " Coincidences " a couple of years ago - an excellent read. Anyway, yesterday evening I was in my kitchen cooking whilst my wife was painting the walls. She had the radio on (a very rare event - purely to relieve the monotony of the painting) and it was tuned into the local commercial station "210 FM" which was playing the syndicated Pepsi chart presented by "Dr" Fox (have never discovered what his PhD is in!?). There was a competition for people to win a state of the art picture mobile telephone. At one stage he read out the names of some of the winners. I disctinctly recall him reading out " James Plaskett from Tamworth - hello James." Your name was one of about 5 names - and the only one which he followed with a personal hello (as though he knew the listener). I immediately said to my wife, "I think I know who that is - I've got a book by him." It all made sense a...

On May 4th 2003, James Eadon forwarded me an e mail from a Frenchman called Michel Raynal. Raynal had contacted him about me and the excerpts from Coincidences concerning the giant octopus which he must have got hold of through Google references to my work at Eadon´s site. He said that he had been unable to obtain the book and asked if Eadon could photocopy pages and send them to him. He also explained that he and other biologists were currently examining samples of the tissues of the 1896 Florida globster. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globster I got back to Monsieur Raynal and sold him the book. He also revealed that the first results of the three teams working on the 1896 tissues indicated that it was not a cetacean! A few days later I e mailed him that I had footage of the 1999 expedition to Bermuda and asked if he would be interested in buying copies. He said that he certainly would, but replied on May 25th that the price I quoted was beyond his means. He added that he might be int...

In April 2003 I looked on the internet for references to anti-Darwinist, Richard Milton. One was for a website ran by Mikey Brass, where he had panned Milton’s anti-Darwinian writings. I left a note that I was impressed with Milton, and Brass e mailed me back that he was a moron and I must be too to support him and that if I were to say more on this topic I would have to do it at the Yahoo! DebunkCreation list, or not at all. So I joined it, making my first post on April 9th 2003, and for the next two months debated with a pack of neo-Darwinists. There were, I noted, about three hundred and eighty list members, although only twenty-five or so were actively posting. I concluded my critique of synthetic evolution with six posts, each detailing why a certain aspect of synthetic evolutionary theory was invalid. The last of these I presented on June 9th 2003, and then I returned in early October 2003 to answer some criticisms made of my fifth post. On June 13th 2003 I was logged on to the...

In early 2001 Justin Horton gave my book Coincidences a less than warm review in Kingpin magazine - http://www.chesscenter.com/kingpin/Kingpin/ By an amazing coincidence, I wrote in praise of Jim Plaskett a couple of issues ago, and I have now been asked to review his book Coincidences . I'm not sure I can..., if only because it would take more space... than the book,... is intrinsically worth. ... Plaskett relates a number of apparently bizarre coincidences in his life, while taking us through his unsuccessful attempts to have an anti-Darwinian TV programme... broadcast, and his conviction that coincidences are evidence of deeper... hidden patterns... All the usual suspects - Koestler, van der Post, pyramid patterns are invoked. ... I could take several thousand words to explain... why this is a load of tripe, but... it is not my experience that rational explanations... satisfy those who take refuge in mysticism to compensate for an inadequate understanding of evolution, of scie...

On June 11th 2003 my wife found a tee shirt whilst fishing with our son on the local beach. Fiona had been thinking about my going in to see the head of our son’s school the next day and to discuss (in my fumbling Spanish) certain problems the boy had been experiencing. She had been considering, she subsequently informed me, my wearing a tee shirt which I had acquired at a tournament in Northern Spain three years earlier which had information about chess in Spanish on its front. Her idea was that talking to a GM might impress the man. But she had been unable to find it. She had also been looking for one piece missing from a wooden chess set of hers: a white bishop. The tee shirt she discovered on the beach had a black chess bishop on its front and also two escutcheons. Under one was " Diputacion de Alicante Juventud " and beneath the other " Ayuntamiento de Alicante Educacion " (Alicante Education Town Hall). It fitted me, so I would sometimes wear it, although I di...

On April 4th 2003 I sent this e mail to Dr Roderick Main - Hola! Did your book Revelations of Chance ever materialize? Hope you are well. James I then appended a few recent examples of coincidence that I had experienced. It had been at least eighteen months since any communication between us and he had last said that he would be aiming to have a book on synchronicity called Revelations of Chance coming out in late 2002. Two days later he replied - Dear James, my book, which will be quite different now from the thesis and may or may not end up being called Revelations of Chance , is still not finished. However, on the very evening you wrote to me, I began a period of four months paid study leave during which I shall have the completing of the book as my sole specific task. I will send you a copy of the book when it does find its way into print (the publisher with whom I have a contract is Brunner- Routledge). I may also try to get in touch before then about the sections relating to you...

At 9:15 a.m on March 18th 2003 I rang Byron Jacobs at his Brighton home from our house in Spain. But it had been some time since I had rung him and I misremembered the number, mistakenly putting in 00441273 and then 326376. A voice answered saying “Villa Spain.” It transpired that I had rung a property company of that name in London. But do not ask me to explain how as the number I had dialled was the above, clearly visible on the display, and the code is for Brighton.

On the morning of March 10th 2003 I rang directory inquiries from a public phone at Birmingham International airport to get the number of Kingsley Napley solicitors in London. I wanted to speak to the defence for Major Charles Ingram in his trial for suspected fraud when winning the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?  There were several false connections and/or instances of the line going dead so I moved across to a nearby phone. Not long after the original phone from which I had been trying to get through rang. I answered it and heard a lady with a Birmingham accent asking if this was Sheila’s house. I told her where she was calling, and she apologised for the wrong number. My mother’s maiden name was Sheila Ingram.

At about 8:40 on the evening of March 9th 2003 I walked into an Easynet café in London’s Strand with the primary intent of sending an e mail to offer some advice to the solicitors representing Major Charles Ingram, who stood accused of cheating on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire ?. At the entrance they were selling food. The computers were in a separate place behind. I moved into that sector and saw that the guy directly in front of me as I walked towards their computers was playing on the Internet Chess Club.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Chess_Club  Like me, he had a travelling bag with him. I sat down next to him and introduced myself. Erik Martin Laborda was a thirty-one year old from Madrid now living in Hither Green. He had been working in the oil business for some months for a London firm called Shielders, having previously been based for a while in Ashford, Kent. He had travelled from Heathrow airport having just arrived back from visiting his parents ...

On March 7th 2003 I was flying from Alicante to Birmingham on a flight where you could sit wherever you pleased. I chose an aisle seat of row twenty-three. A stewardess commented to one of three young men sat behind me that there was an empty seat in row thirteen, if he wanted to move to it. Maybe they had made some remarks about being cramped (?!) He thought about it and then said that he would stay put. I turned around and said that perhaps it was no coincidence that there was a vacant seat in row thirteen. Years earlier I had read of a tendency for people not to want seats in that row. Then I thought of the belief of Gary Kasparov, one which he shared with the late Sir Laurens van der Post, that for him thirteen is actually a lucky number. When recording the video series of his life story I had commented to him upon this (he was the thirteenth world chess champion) and other of his beliefs and said that, for a man charged with representing the rationality of mankind, he seeme...

The examples thus far listed constitute, for the most part, clear cut coincidences or sometimes groupings of two or more. But I also recorded long chains of events, one from September 2001 and another from March 2003, where I had cobbled together clear coincidences, double entendres in speech and headlines and other, often very, very vague, possible correspondences. The first of these, spanning twenty-five pages, I termed ´A Splurge´, and the second, much smaller, one, More of A Splurge . Each contained a lot about the alleged fraudulent win of the top prize on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? by Major Charles Ingram, who was charged with having had assistance in answering the questions from two co-defendants; his wife, Diana, and another contestant, Tecwen Whittock. One of the other major themes was how I was arguing with my wife about the conclusion towards I felt myself being inexorably drawn; Life is a dream. I then experimented on March 6th 2003 by adding the Splurges to t...

At 9:20 p.m. on February 14th 2003 I was amending this part of the original text of Coincidences - In 1987, I had read a book by Ian Wilson called The After Death Experience in which Sabom’s work was also mentioned. The simplicity and importance of checking whether people who reported such experiences could verify events that took place when they were technically unconscious struck me immediately. Why all this waffle about "it could all just be a chemical reaction in the brain" when a perfect method of establishing whether it were or not existed? It appears here between Points ( 41 ) and ( 42 ) of the Part Two: The Narrative, Epilogues and Appendices section, which itself is to be found after Entry 22. I amended the piece in inverted commas to "it could just be all in the brain" . As I did so I heard a remark made on the TV kids programme which my son was watching behind me. It was called Goosebumps and a boy said "I am in and out of the book!" ...

On September 10th 2002 we were in The Park of Nations in Torrevieja, where we had been on our first inspection visit two years earlier. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrevieja Lisa Harrison had shown us around as a rep for the property company GAMA .  RANGE (gamagrupo.es)  We saw some iguanas in a cage and that prompted me to remark that we had been told by Lisa that she had owned a pet iguana. Later we walked a few hundred metres to a MacDonalds and as we sat outside eating, Lisa Harrison walked past. I said hello and mentioned how the previous iguana sighting had put me in mind of her. She said that one of the iguana cages in the park had originally been hers. She now no longer worked for GAMA . We had only ever seen her before during the brief contacts when she sold us the house, and we were never to see her again.

On July 9th 2002, Benjamin Owens ordered a copy of Coincidences from me, via the Internet Chess Club. He had taken the unappealing chess handle of CManson ; a reference to serial killer, Charles Manson. I asked for his address, and so discovered that he lived in Ebenezer Road, Marietta, Georgia, U.S.A. I was living at 10 Ebenezer Road, Hastings, England. Although the road he lived in was very long indeed, mine had just ten houses in it.

In mid-May 2002 my wife called me in to see an episode of The Simpsons she was watching, as it featured Stephen Jay Gould. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Gould  He had been called in by Lisa Simpson to test the putative fossil of an angel. At the end of the show he admitted that he had not done the tests. Here are some facts about this episode - Lisa the Skeptic Synopsis While Lisa and her classmates conduct an archaeological survey, a skeleton with abnormal bone structure protruding from its shoulders is uncovered, leading the townspeople to conclude the remains are that of an angel. First aired in US 23 Nov 1997. First aired in Australia 22 Apr 1998. But it was shown on UK TV 3 - 4 days before Gould’s actual death. Also - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_the_Skeptic

I was thinking upon a letter Marcus Haywood wrote to me in early 1998 defending the authenticity of the authenticity of a "spiritual source". In it Hayward described himself as " a senior figure around that spiritual source " and that he could vouch for him "... because I have known fire, in my own home... to know fire is to be feared, to be misunderstood... and not to care!... " etc. The source had indeed constantly referred to the importance, the centrality even, of this mysterious, mystical spiritual, fire.  He even said that he had never heard any other contemporary, self-proclaimed gnostic or yogi speak of it.  I had written back that -  a ) Haywood’s having had this experience did not give that teacher the right to do anything he pleased, and b ) It did not necessarily say too much about this figure's significance as a spiritual teacher/authority either, for many people have had spiritual experiences, including myself, (see Epilogue A) and th...

V At 2:25 p.m. on Saturday 12th January 2002 I was chatting with Robert Mucci in his secondhand shop in Hastings. I congratulated him on his wife’s pregnancy. He said the baby was due on the 19th March, the day after my own birthday. I then spotted some old chess medals of mine in a pile of assorted bric-a-brac. He had bought them from me years earlier and clearly not yet sold them. I joked that there were some things which it was hard to shift at any price. I then mentioned that I had since acquired another such medal through winning a pub tournament the previous week. But my son liked it and so it would not be up for sale. As I said so a man older than myself walked into the shop and handled the medal to which I had been pointing. I turned to leave, mentioning to the newcomer that it had been mine. He looked at me and said "We have played". He put it down and left the shop with me, explaining that his name was Scholes. I asked if he played for Manchester United, the j...

V On December 11th 2001 I caught part of a conversation from the Richard and Judy TV show where host, Richard Madeley, was challenging a lady guest who said that a man should always be held at least fifty per cent responsible for any pregnancy, even when it could be shown through conversations and diary entries that a woman had deceived him and had done it deliberately. I was angered by her stance, not least because the jaws of this kind of trap had once nearly closed on me, and for the only time in my life I was moved to call in to a live TV discussion programme to give my thoughts. I got through to an assistant and told her that in my opinion a new criminal offence should be created for the act of entrapment. Certainly there would be great difficulty in obtaining evidence, but, when possible, prosecutions should be brought. (Later my wife asked what ought to be thought of some of her ex-partners who had not asked her if she had contraception. A good point...) My details were...

At 6:26 p.m. on July 7th 2001 I was reading from page fifteen of that day’s Daily Telegraph . I read a report of the summings up in the trial of Jeffrey Archer, headed Witnesses who died ‘would clear Archer’ In 1987 Archer had brought a libel case against the Daily Star over a story that he had used a prostitute. He was now accused of perverting the course of justice through having a friend provide him with a false alibi. Lord Archer’s lawyer argued that the death of several key figures, including the 1987 trial judge, had weakened his chances of an adequate defence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Archer Below that was a piece on the conviction of Gary Day, who had accidentally killed Monica Coghlan by crashing his car into hers on April 27th 2001. Coincidentally, Ms Coghlan had been the prostitute named in 1987. In neither piece was her death cited as one of those that might have affected the current Archer trial. I then took note of another article on the same page. It began -...

On July 12th 2001 I visited the Stables Market in Camden to teach chess to the owner, Bebo Kobo. I had been there only once or twice before over the previous ten years, on each occasion to visit Murray Sharp, who used to have a stall there.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camden_Market This time I noticed that near the entrance they had put up a piece of paper with the names of celebrities who had visited the market. I noted such as Alice Cooper and Jerry Hall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Hall That was the only time that I ever saw such a list displayed, even though I was to visit the market regularly over the following months. Later that day I chatted with Murray, whom I had known for a decade, at his home. Without any prompting from me, he now for the first time mentioned that, ten years or so earlier, Jerry Hall had introduced herself to him when he had his stall at the Stables Market. I then told him how I had earlier seen her name there. On March 28th 2002 I went with my ...

Paul McLahan of Massachusetts, USA, bought a copy of my book Coincidences . http://www.facebook.com/paul.mcclanahan.5 I knew him from the Internet Chess Club by his handle of Fishon . He sent me this e-mail back on May 5th 2001 - On Thursday I read the part of your book where you give the story of the baboons and the mantis (Pages 49-51 )... that afternoon I went fishing with a friend and I had the story in the back of my mind. We caught no fish all day. Right before we were leaving the water, my friend had a fish strike his lure. He went to set the hook, and nothing... but when he retrieved the lure there was an eyeball attached to the hook. "water" "eyeball"? and I had just read the reference that morning! coincidence? Later he affirmed the story with this subsequent e mail - 44. FishOn (18:43 05-May-01 EDT): - sometime after leaving my message(s) to you... I was concerned that maybe you thought is was a joke. I assure you, that even though the chance of ...

"I happen to believe that elevating a human being into a "higher power" who possesses spiritual insight not given to ordinary mortals is dangerous and misguided, but I can envisage circumstances in which I might succumb." Prof. Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay " ... "I believe that we are at the end of the guru system and that its current abuses disqualify it from the business of serious spiritual transformation. The next five years will see a blizzard of financial and sexual scandals which I am certain will make this point painfully clear even to those who now believe implicitly in the guru system and are prepared to fight dirty to preserve it."  Andrew Harvey, The Return of the Mother 1994 r In Aug ustIn August of 1980, Jeff Katz of Bedfordshire on Sunday  interviewed me and then a week or two later we met up again at a lecture given by a self proclaimed spiritual authority in the Bedford Corn Exchange. "It´s interesting, isn´t it?". ...