Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary

(Further to Entry 272, on December 3rd 2012 I uploaded some of the details of that Entry to my Facebook page and added the link to the In Depth interview with Hitchens. It prompted these comments. Angela Radice, suggests that I had resided in a certain street in Bedford.  I had.  And then relates that she only ever stayed one night in Bedford and that was at a wedding reception in a hotel in that street. And then, during our interchange, she discovers the hotel was once her husband´s family home.) Jackie Barclay Bates Bonham   I know you like this synchronicity thing James so if it's of any consequence, my dad was in the Navy when he met my mum, a Wren.   Angela Radice   My father-in-law was in the army and went to see one of his men in a military hospital. He admired a nurse who was looking after him and discovered that she lived nearby him at home in Bedford. He married her. H. James Plaskett   ... and my mum lives in Bedford. My dad died there. ...

At 23:32 December 2nd 2012, I was at about 6:05 minutes into this enormously long In Depth interview with Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens - In Depth - YouTube I had never listened to it before although I had listened to many other Youtube clips with him.  I had just turned to Wikipedia to look up Scapa Flow.  I was moved to do this - I had never consulted that Wikipedia page before - because he had just referred to his father being a career Naval Officer who had grown up in Portsmouth and gone straight from school into the Navy. My maternal grandfather had also grown up in Portsmouth, where he was born, and gone straight from school into the Navy. He had served in both World Wars. I had heard from some family member that he was a signalman in the First and had re-enlisted after his desertion when the King issued a King´s Pardon for all deserted signalmen after the war had started, such was the demand for th em. Desertion was a capital offence and for some y...

On October 10th 2012 I received a message at Facebook from Deborah Cowley. She said she was getting in touch as she lived in Newquay and had recently received a gift copy of my book Coincidences . During the course of our introductory exchange I sensed something synchronous re her identification of my signature and my specification that the only error I thought I had made in my otherwise meticulous recording of coincidence was in not capturing the facial similarities between myself and Peter Seiffert singing the role of Parsifal in a photo in the Sunday Times of late 1987. October 10 Deborah Hi James, just reading your book, Coincidences and just wondered if I could send you a little piece I wrote myself a number of years ago. Incidently, While reading your book, a few coincidences have happened to me such as one day before I read you a friend of mine reccommended I read Coming Up For Air by George Orwell, which your book mentiones. Have sent a friend request. Kind r...