‘Coincidences happen all the time in life, they are not allowed in fiction’ David Lodge
My father told me that if you have c.20 people in a room there is a 50:50 chance that two will share a birthday
We had 10+ in media on Madalinskiego, my daughter was born on the same day as one, Malgorzata. Her mother shared a birthday with Yedneral, my boss in Moscow. I’ve had a couple of girlfriends, two had the same birthday
It’s not magic ... it’s statistics. You can google the maths
Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains the numbers in ‘Black Swan’.. or for an easier to digest version simply watch my cousin Derren Brown. If that’s too tricky, Will Smith summarises part of the theory in Focus with Margot Robbie ... &. by happy coincidence Margot Robbie explains the black swan of the financial bubble, naked in a bubble bath with a glass of bubbly in the Big Short
I once randomly sat with a couple in Palma airport, she knew my first boss at Saatchi ... her husband went the same optician as me in Primrose Hill ... where Daniel Craig gets his specs
Everyone in Liverpool has a Daniel Craig story. He went to school there. 200 kids per year, 6 years in High school ... c.100 teachers on staff ... everyone has a brother, a sister, a cousin, a colleague who went to that school... my mother lived next door to his music teacher. Do you know James Bond...? ‘If you hum it, I’ll play it’
It’s simply the power of numbers, six degrees of separation
... & then it gets Uri Geller spoon bendingly spooky
Returning from a student exchange in America I had nowhere to live in my second year at Middlesex University. Everyone had ‘coupled up’ in various houses around the grottier parts of North London. But an eccentric English lecturer was advertising his attic so I moved into a garret in High Barnet ... so North London it’s actually Hertfordshire. He was heading to Scotland for some reason so I gave him my parents address ‘in case of emergency’ ...
The mad bastard only goes & shows up on their doorstep ... he was an looney literature teacher but my father was a crazy Engineer so they survived the night I imagine. I don’t know, I wasn’t there ... but my sister was. And in the morning she received a rejection letter from Middlesex
Senior Lecturer Robert Crick turned to Senior Lecturer Robert D Brown; “Hand me the phone”
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I met with Jonathan Margolis from the FT to discuss his participation in a conference. His daughter has the same name as my sister, his son the same name as my father. I mention an amazing article I’d read about Ikea once in his paper... could he get me a copy. Get it...? He bloody wrote it
My oldest friendship is with another Jonathan, we were at school together from five years old. In Moscow we had a wonderful nanny for our daughter. She taught my daughter to paint.
I could easily remember her phone number in Moscow... it was 2153, the same as Jonathan in Edinburgh
