To ask for your coincidences.

[Xmasisoffsantahascovid]

Adult ds visited yesterday. Discussing the Lotto, telling him I had put a few lucky dips on over Christmas! He was saying he had kept the same chosen numbers since moving out of home 4 years ago. His gf also does Lotto with her own chosen numbers.. Her grandma saw their tickets on the table last week and asked why they had the same chosen numbers? Another odd thing both of them chose those numbers in the November of the same year. They hadn't even met them. Quite a recent relationship and don't live together..

I went to Uni with a Russian girl with a very unique first name and surname. She was more of an acquaintance but I remembered her for her distinct name. After Uni I moved away and wasn’t ever sure what happened to her. This was 17 or so years ago.

About 5 years ago was driving in the car with DH and the man on the radio is talking about an Olympian/sportswoman with the same names as Russian Uni Acquaintance (or RUA for ease). I said “God I think I went to Uni with her! I didn’t know she was into XSport let alone a professional!.” Googled the sportsperson and said “Oh it’s not my RUA, they just share the same name, how weird”.

Which is a tiny bit random on itself, or maybe the name is not that rare in Russia. Except when I was Googling her I heard this voice outside (hot weather, windows were down) that I recognised. as I looked up from my phone, we were sat at traffic lights and - in this random town where I didn’t go to Uni, over a decade after I’d left - and who did I see crossing at the light but the actual RUA. I stared at her for ages and it was 100% her walking with a man, the voice matched too. I hadn’t seen this woman in 12 years, and there she was as I was Googling her name-twin.

I checked to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating (new mum, no sleep 🤣) and DH confirmed there was indeed a Russian sounding woman in a white dress crossing the road

Isn't it a coincidence that in episode 2 of the 60th special the aliens couldn't quite get the body dimensions right.

Then in the next episode with the Toy Maker episode he had 6 fingers.

Coincidence?

I don't believe in coincidences!!!

(Actually for the most part this is true, I don't. We tend to mix in fairly self selecting social circles so you are quite likely to 'bump into' someone you have something in common with - more than you realise. Even stuff like meeting someone with the same birthday as you, the odds aren't that 'out there' because there's only 365 days in the year.)

If you start actively looking for patterns or coincidences you'll see them everywhere. If you don't. You won't.

forgetting the meaning of the thread for a moment, i was asking in general did you think the toymaker was a good character etc for the show ?

on that one i sorta agree, sometimes even if you dont actively look, sometimes they still happen naturally.

Hmmm. I don't think we have seen the last of him. It injects total chaos to the plotlines. Which is an interesting device (maybe a bit desperate...) And he rigs all contests in his favour and goes against the laws of physics. I like Neil Patrick Harris and his dance sequence was excellent but man was the acting bad otherwise (I don't mean the fake deliberate accent either - I mean the hamminess of the rest of it). So yeah probably needed to throw a spanner in the works. I'm expecting lots of coincidences next series.

Ill admit an intriguing and intresting character, and the way he was in the box, certainly seems open to a return. although im intrigued also by the one who waits, as to which character that refers to im not sure , unless its Captain Jack

On my dad's side of the family we are all born on the 7th. There's 12 of us. Every month is covered by a birthday on the 7th
It's me and my 3 siblings, 3 cousins, 1 uncle, 1 parent, dgm and 3 of her brothers.

I have one sister, our mother is called Anne.
my mother in law is called Anne, my sisters mother in law is called Anne.
So myself, my husband, sister and my brother in law all have mothers named Anne and mother in laws named Anne.
Which means our children all have grandmothers called Anne too.
There is some age difference of around 10 years or so between the Anne’s (to account for name popularity).

Oh I like your coincidence @Headlightshome
All dgm's in my family are 'Gran Grace, Gran Mary' etc so I wonder how the kids in your family separate who is who? Or do they all have different names like Nan, Granny, Nanna etc?

I've posted this before. My door number is 283. When the pandemic first happened and we were called in for vaccination, at the door of the vaccination centre I was handed a raffle ticket with a number that would be called when it was my turn. The number I got was 283. Bit of a coincidence. A few weeks later I was going through a memory box of things we kept when my mum died. The first thing I put my hand on was a bundle of bits of paper from Inside her purse..... containing a raffle ticket with the number 283 on it! She even wrote the date she was given the ticket in 1980. Did she predict where I was going to live? Spooky.

I was 17 when I had dc. On the 17th.. 17 days before my birthday.. Midwife's 17th delivery...
Also got 17 cards of congratulations!

My husband and daughter both born on 12th September!

And my husband and I lived about 25 miles apart before meeting, seemingly oaths never crossed but my mum went to school with his cousin, his dad worked with my mum's dad and knew him and his other daughter very well. My Nana worked with my MILS cousin many moons ago. Just lots of things that overlap, it's so odd

What on earth does he look like that that could happen 😁how would anyone recognize and remember a person in the background of a 3 year old photo?

I’m a dental nurse. The dentist I work with bought another practice. They had a dentist to work there but no nurse. I was asked to go and work there for 2 weeks. My second day there a new patient came in. I recognised his name. Went out and said “this is a very odd question but were you ever in the RAF?” He replied your (name) aren’t you? He was our next door neighbour when we lived in Germany when I was 3!!

An elderly man I know needed a lift to the airport to fly home, but the friend he'd stayed with couldn't drive him so a neighbour offered.

They got talking in the car. Turned out the neighbour was one of my numerous second cousins.

When I was 9, my mum got a dog from a family who were travelling a lot with their jobs and couldn’t look after it, the family lived 20 miles from our house and it was an advert response. Years later I met my current DP both living in another country from our home, we were talking about pets and stuff, and it turned out that that dog was his family’s dog, all he could remember was that it was given to a little girl (me) to look after.

Many years ago I moved in with my boyfriend (now husband). He rented his deceased grandparent’s’ house from his dad. I’d brought a load of stuff with me from my mum’s and was unpacking my mess into his mess.

I then came across my paternal grandmother’s birth certificate. I was utterly bemused. She was dead. My mother and her had a terrible toxic relationship. I couldn’t work out why I’d clearly accidentally grabbed it in my papers from my mum’s and why my mum would even have this thing.

Partner came home. I showed him and he said: “No that’s my grandma!”

Turns out our grandmas had exactly the same name, birthday and place of birth - think Jessica Marie Charlton, April 28 1918, Lichfield.

We did quite quickly establish they weren’t the same woman and we weren’t related. Ha.

A few months ago, I received a newsletter email from my old university. I don't normally bother reading them but for some reason opened it and I noticed the intro was written by someone with the same name as someone who had been on my uni course. It was a different person (there was a photo of the newsletter writer so I knew it wasn't them) but it got me wondering about what had happened to that person from my course. I did a quick Facebook search and they had a public profile so I had a quick snoop on it (as you do) to satisfy my curiosity. I thought nothing of it and went about my day. I went along to support my husband on a parkrun that morning and sure enough, this person was there. My husband has done that parkrun lots of times before and I'd never seen them there before. It's in a different part of the country to where we went to uni, the person doesn't live in that area and isn't from there, they just happened to be visiting a friend nearby that weekend. I hadn't had any contact with them (or even thought about them) since we graduated over 20 years ago and then I randomly bump into them an hour or so after I'd Facebook stalked them. V weird!

the Christmas present I gave my DH was the exact same thing that he had been looking at to buy himself months ago and I had no idea until he told me afterwards. I was in the shop the other day looking for a birthday card and they have with sympathy cards just above the happy birthday grandad cards I lost my grandad in 2021. I was reading a comment online the other week and it had oxo in it twice and the nickname my grandad had for me was OXO because the mum in the old OXO adverts was called Katie.

My last job was totally remote/WFH and for a year, I worked closely with a woman who lived on the other end of the country. I left the job without ever meeting her in person, and we didn't stay in touch.

About a year later, I was driving through a tiny (TINY) rural village about 20 miles from my home when I decided on the spur of the moment to stop at a playground with my kids. The whole village was deserted and we were the only people there. The kids were playing away when suddenly, I heard someone call "Jack, is that you??", and when I turned, there was the woman outside the playground with her boyfriend. Turns out they were passing through on their way to a holiday let a few miles away, and had decided on the spur of the moment to stop for ice cream.

So totally and bizarrely random!!

I used to go on holiday to a caravan site to a little seaside town as a child, every school holiday.

The caravan opposite ours had a boy a year older than me that me and my brother were friends with.

We were all from London, although different zones.

My family moved from London to a completely different seaside town to the caravan site in my early teen years.

My first day at my new high school, I was in the playground when I felt a tap on my shoulder.

It was the boy from the caravan site - him and his family had moved to this other seaside town too, only a few months previously. I couldn't believe it!

Not a brilliant one, but:

Back in the days when shops used to sell 'ex juke box' singles, I was looking for a particular single that had been in the charts the previous year. The singles were in a revolving rack, four rows high, about 20 singles in each section. I started searching systematically through them, flipping through each section front to back. Near the end, I thought 'I'm not going to find this now - but I might as well finish'. The one I wanted was the very last single in the last section in the order I was searching.

Today after our lunch , we went for a walk Me Dh and Dd with our dog a staffy . We live in a small village in Switzerland .There are three other staffys in our village which is quite unusual
in itself as they are a little know breed here .and they are a British dog So we were just at the end of our walk when we spotted one of the staffys we know, we were chatting to the owner when one of the others came around the corner , we continued to chat and as we did the other one appeared with his owners and they also had a relatives staffy that was staying with them . So there were 5 staffys in the same spot at the same time .our walk had taken over an hour , so it was so odd that we all met up .One final strange coincidence the last staffy to arrive was called Nico when we met him about a year ago the owner introduced himself and said this is Nico we have just moved here from Sicily and I’m also called Nico what is your staffy called , we said she is called Valentina , to which he replied , my wife is called Valentina 😀