Snapshots: A Coincidence Diary

V On the morning of September 4th 2011 I drove into the side of a passing motorist on a small street of the Valencian town of Javea, over 200 kilometres north of my home. It turned out the other guy, Señor Puig, lived at 29 Calle Angel Bruna in Cartagena, about a kilometre and a half from my house. On January 29th 2017 I returned to my parked car to discover that a motorist had turned into it, damaging a light and knocking the rear bumper off. This incident occured in a different Valencian town: Benissa. He, chivalrously, left a note of apology, admitting responsibility and appending his name. Which was Adrian Puig.

At about 0:30 a.m. on November 27th 2010 I saw something go by on Twitter from Cliff Stanford - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Stanford CliffStanford Cliff Stanford http://bit.ly/ghXxz0 @ akaSylvia @ pewari For a browser to make this calculation, it must load all table contents, (cont) http://tl.gd/761l6j At first I was confused but then followed the first link to find a site posted by fellow Twitterer, ratherdash , where people were being asked to turn to the nearest book when they would find that the third sentence of the second paragraph of the seventy-third page would define their life. Stanford had posted just that sentence with references to two other Twitterers one of whom, akaSylvia , I too was following. The only book adjacent to my laptop was a biography of Richard Branson, Branson , by Tom Bower which I had recently started rereading. Turning to page 73 could not have been easier because I had a bookmark where I had  halted. Between pages 72 and 73. The appropri...

On the morning of October 23rd 2007 I dreamed and then recorded the saddest dream - Sic Transit Gloria It is a setting where a dying George Best has passed an envelope containing loose change and scraps of money to me and asked me to take it to an address in Alicante. As I hand the money over to an old guy in a modest setting in Alicante, some of the lineaments of his face strike a chord. "Are you Nobby Stiles?" I ask. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobby_Stiles He says something back, with a laughing annoyance at having been recognised. Later I also meet up with Jackie Charlton   Jack Charlton - Wikipedia   and a guy with a vaguely familiar face who is forever bursting into high pitched flamenca song. At the end I realise that this is Gordon Banks and remark so to someone passing who concurs.  Gordon Banks - Wikipedia I remark also to someone that Nobby Stiles must have fallen on hard times to be living in such reduced circumstances and he, naturally, agrees. I twig t...

On the afternoon of August 17th 2010 I found myself thinking back to this hit of the 1970s - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgZb86W-Zj0 although I had not heard the song nor even heard of it for a decade at least. I returned home and found that several e mails had arrived in my absence and that the first was from Kelly Dudley It was headed Something Old, Something New . Two below it was one from someone called ´Blue Humphries´.   Facebook  This turned out to be a Facebook message saying - Blue Humphries also commented on Sarah-Jane van der Westhuizen's photo album. Facebook Blue wrote: "I like my view of the Kymin but that is gorgeous !! NEVER move,lol" Shortly afterwards I was chatting on Facebook with Jeanna Tal, daughter of Mikhail Tal -  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tal . I asked her if she might be getting married soon. She said not and asked why I had asked. I explained these lead in coincidences. Shortly after at Facebook I saw that Mercedes Diane Gri...

At 7.35 p.m. on May 10th 2010 I was approaching the summit of San Julian hill near my home. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEwQItCOjKw I found myself thinking of press announcements that an Indian holy man had been observed performing a paranormal feat -  http://www.physorg.com/news192690076.html I thought, rather whimsically, that I might semi-seriously use this story to apply for James Randi´s $1 Million -  http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html  Some years earlier I had crossed swords with Randi about his refusal to test a guy making a similar claim - http://web.archive.org/web/20041023083501/www.alternativescience.com/james-randi.htm He had written back that if they took such kooks seriously then they did not have time to deal with the "serious claimants". the serious claimants . That from a man whose raison détre is the stance that all paranormal phenomena are nonsensical. He had ended communications with " Thank you for your inane input ."...

On January 19th 2010 I mentioned to my wife that the story of my contemporary, Murray Chandler, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Chandler sounded like it was worth making into a film. The previous month a chap called Edwards had told me that on his 16th birthday Chandler´s parents had found a note pinned to his bedroom door informing them that he had taken a flight from his New Zealand home to London where he would be pursuing the life of a chess professional. Edwards added that he had wanted to go on his 15th birthday but jibbed when he realised that he would have to attend school in the UK. At 21 Chandler bought his first house in London, at 23 he acquired the Grandmaster title and at 25 had purchased a large garden flat in Earls Court. Then, at 46, he returned to New Zealand. Fiona disparaged his life and said that there were many such instances of people striking out on their own and making it. She cited her late friend and fan, Ziggy Frankel. http://www.zygmuntfrankel.com/ In...

In the earliest hours of Boxing Day 2009 I was looking up details of St. Crispin and his patronage of shoemakers.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crispin  I was moved to do so because of a lingering interest generated by my £250,000 question on Who Wants to be A Millionaire? some four years earlier. (See Entry 224) I then thought about looking up more details of the astronomer Shoemaker, after whom, I understood, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 had been named. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Merle_Shoemaker http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/sl9/news81.html I discovered facts about him that surprised me by their significances, not least in the context of the next question I was to face on t h e show; the one which stopped me - ( Which of these astronauts has never set foot on the moon?) - and also relating to the Entry http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com/2006/03/part-two-narrative-epilogues-and.html . Eugene Merle Shoemaker (1928 – 1997) was best known as an astrono...

On the early evening of December 16th 2009 I checked the Statcounter statistics for this blog and saw that someone in Beirut had very recently accessed it by putting the origin of christmas for veni vidi vinci into a search engine.  My own Blog was the first hit thrown up by that implausible, Lebanese search. I noted the fourth was - http://www.berkshirepublishing.com/blog/?p=654 and browsed it briefly. I was surprised by how frequent a misquotation this seems to be. (Although I had noticed one other occasion when my blog had been thrown up by a similar search.) In Entry 44 here the misquoting was deliberate. And that TV Channel 4 News report chose to phrase it "Veni, vidi, da Vinci".  Living the Dream: A Coincidence Diary: (44) Veni, vidi ... da Vinci? (james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com) I left a comment about the misquote and pointed the owner of the Berkshire Publishing Blog, Karen Christensen, to my blog.  About five hours later I turned to the Chess...

On the afternoon of October 31st 2009 I found myself making a comparison between the reaction of Raymond Keene to a knight manouevre executed by Aaron Nimzowitsch and inserting the odd, perhaps rare expression learnt in a foreign language into one´s attempts to converse in it. The move N(g3)-h1 was eulogised by Keene in his 1973 biography of Nimzowitsch. He wrote that when he first saw the game in which this retreat was executed (the knight quickly re-emerged via f2 to play a key part in his victory) he was so impressed that he kept trying in his own games to create situations in which he too could play N(g3)-h1. That, to say the least, could not easily be effected. In the thousands of games that I had played I did not think that I had even once played N(g3)-h1 and, apart from the Nimzowitsch game, could not think of any other where I had seen it deployed. I later determined that this was the game http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?/gid=1007481 Knights are hardly ever sent into c...

On the morning of June 5th 1991 I was selling advertising space for Cornhill Publications. I began introducing myself for the first time to sales prospects as ´James Marsh´. Many salespeople used pseudonyms, although in my few months in that job I had never before adopted one. The name was partly inspired by Plaskett´s meaning ´marsh dweller´. That afternoon through the hubbub in the office I heard colleague Tim Preston ask to speak to "... your President, James Marsh." It transpired that out of the hundreds of potential leads he had chosen to call one with which he had no previous dealings and their President was James Marsh. ... ... ... Some months later I had a dream which was ´scripted´ around an episode of the 1970s BBC drama Colditz which I had seen in the early 1970s. http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Colditz_(TV_series ) The series was set in Colditz castle which was being used by the Germans during the Second World War to house hard case P.O.Ws. My dream was framed around an...

V A codicil to Entry (6) http://james-plasketts-coincidence-diary.blogspot.com/2006/03/6-shambolic-wogans-winner-pennies.html  happened in September 2009. Derren Brown performed a TV stunt in which he appeared to have predicted the 6 balls drawn in the National Lottery. I contributed to various threads about it at the guardian.co.uk Comment Is Free site. One, by Vicky Frost, invited readers to vote on how he could have pulled it off. I chipped in with a post which became, at 16 Sep 09, 11:01pm, the penultimate - Vote: How did Derren Brown do it? http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/tvandradioblog/poll/2009/sep/10/derren-brown-television?commentid=a90557e8-53e7-42f9-857c-988eb9899cb1 Quite late on September 9th I posted at Vicky Frost´s CiF piece of September 7th re Derren Brown´s staking his career on predicting the lottery. I pointed out that it had been done before and gave a link to Entry 6 at my Blog. The number of hits the Blog got that day was over 1400. It was averagin...

On April 23rd 2008 I parked my dark blue, Hyundai Accent in the centre of Cartagena. I returned to it a while later, opened the door and stepped inside... to find a mysterious magnetic religious icon on the dash. I then noticed it was in a far more spruce condition generally. It was not my car! Although mine was parked just 10-15 metres further along this same road, it was of identical make and colouring and, somewhat disturbingly, my key opened it...

I gave a fiver to a mendicant couple in Southend at Easter 2007, the first occasion that I gave more than a few coins to beggars. A day or two later my (somewhat scruffily attired) wife and son dined at the El Descargador restaurant in La Union  VENTA EL DESCARGAR, La Unión - Reviews & Photos - Tripadvisor  and, to their great surprise, when it came to paying the bill they discovered that it had already been paid for them by an anonymous couple at an adjacent table, who had since departed. On March 21st 2009 I contributed five pounds to a minibus fare in Leicestershire, although, in view of the number of passengers, I needed only to contribute just over a pound. The next day I hopped in a taxi for the return journey to the same railway station with someone whom I did not know and he offered to pay the entire fare of 5.80 Pounds. I insisted on chipping in about half. On March 23rd 2009 I returned to a girl at a Bureau de Change at Luton airport an extra 10 pounds she had m...

Circa 2:30 a.m. on June 24th 2009 I was seriously thinking about putting something on Facebook about the cute, minor coincidences of my names being Harold James and Harry Potter´s names being Harry James with us sharing the same surname initial, too. Also, due to a fall down the stairs on May 18th 2009 I had acquired a similar zigzag mark on the right forehead, the same place as his! I had already posted a small reference to those on Twitter on June 15th 2009 - Last dressing off... got a true Harry James Potter scar now.. and in the same place. Just as well my name´s Harold James Plaskett...!?¿ 10:06 AM Jun 15th A few minutes later my wife, who had recently returned home from a concert, shouted out that she had just noticed that amongst those who had begun to follow her on Twitter during her three hour evening out was none other than the actor who plays the boy wizard: Daniel Radcliffe! (... or someone masquerading as him!?) And this without her having herself followed him first......

In the summer of 2008 I suffered a severe, public low blood sugar fit or hypoglaecemia attack. Following some days of observation in hospital I was released and advised to have my head checked out (they had already ascertained that there was no alcohol nor trace of drugs in my blood system) to see if epilepsy or some other disorder might be involved, and so in December 2008 I went to the same nearby hospital for my first ever electoencephelogram. It was conducted by a woman. The results showed nothing unusual. But when I saw a doctor afterwards about them at the Neurological department of the Naval Hospital in Cartagena, she advocated a CAT Scan, just to make absolutely sure all was okay. This I had at the Hospital Virgen de la Caridad in the last week of January 2009. The results I was told would be sent to my GP... or at least that was what I, with my imperfect Spanish, understood the hospital personnel who conducted the scan to be saying. I noted that all of them were women. But the...

On the morning of February 27th 2009 I at last got around to making amendments to my essay Playing The Game   (The link to that essay is now defunct.) The alteration I made was to include the text of an e mail that I had sent to Bob Woffinden and the Ingrams on May 10th 2008, and which I later forwarded to Jon Ronson, as a codicil to the essay´s first point. On each occasion I had headed the e mail Another Such Cough . It read - As a further illustration of what I am getting at, at a car boot fair this morning a stall holder brought up with me the subject of Ingram´s win and mentioned the signals "... whenever the guy coughed ". At the adjacent stall was a lady, a smoker, who had earlier that morning, with myself, helped herself to one of the first guy´s chips. At the word " coughed " she coughed. She never coughed again the whole morning. I pointed this out to them. A few minutes after I did so my wife drew my attention to something which she had just spotted in Th...

In the early hours of February 22nd 2009 I made a contribution to Professor Colin Blakemore´s piece at The Guardian ´ s    Comment Is Free  section entitled Science is just one gene away from defeating religion http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/22/genetics-religion Professor Blakemore  Colin Blakemore - Wikipedia  argued hard for a materialist view of everything and suggested that we may soon nail the genes that force so many to take religious ideas seriously. ... at Cambridge... I walked to lectures past the Cavendish Lab... One day, scrawled on the wall, was... "CRICK FOR GOD". No surprise that pivotal advances in science provoke religious metaphors. Crick and Watson's discovery transformed our view of life itself - from a manifestation of spiritual magic to a chemical process. One more territorial gain in the metaphysical chess match between science and religion . Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was certainly a vital move in that chess ...

(Permit me to explain this coincidence by noting that I put up this Blog in March 2006 and gave it the original title of ´ Living the Dream ´. I only altered that to ´ Snapshots ´ in October 2025.) My Statcounter showed that at 7.20 a.m. on Feb 15th 2009 someone in Tokyo had put Chess Dream-A  into a search engine. The 2nd and 3rd hits were of my Blog. But the 8th was - Thought Experiments : The Blog: Living the Dream - [ 翻译此页 ]It's as if she has awoken from a dream, a rather pleasant dream, ... (Why couldn 't it have been chess , where I might have turned my obsession to account, ... www.bryanappleyard.com/blog/2008/07/living-dream.php - 27k - (The Link is now defunct.) I was intrigued and followed the link to discover Bryan Appleyard´s Blog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Appleyard  I had no previous idea that he was a Blogger.  Five hours later on February 15th 2009 I jokingly sent him this e mail in which I pretended annoyance - Sir! I note a Blog entry of your...