It *really * is a small world

Nina my weirdest encounter was about 10 years ago, on holiday in Ithaca. We were staying in a very small village(out of hundreds on the island) and were eating in a small restaurant (out of several in the village).
I couldn't take my eyes off a woman sitting opposite us but it took me about half an hour to eventually remember that her name was Maureen and that I'd known her through work at least 10 years previously.
I went over and said hello and she said she had been spending the last half hour trying to remember who I was.
The odd thing was that Maureen was her real name, but no-one ever called her that and she was always known as Nonnie. That only came back to me hours later!

We always used to meet people my DH knew when we were away on holiday. Once we struggled with buggies, beach bags , two toddlers & buckets & spades etc over some rocks to get to a quiet & secluded sandy bay. As we started to find our spot the guy from the one other couple on the beach called out to DH. The guy was a professional football scout and knew DH who ran his school's football team!

My nephew and neice originally from Bristol, bumped into each other quite by chance at Oxford Circus tube station.

You don't have to be on holiday. Mr absent and I lived in the same London street in the 1970s, shopped in the same parade of local shops and drank (occasionally) in the same pub. We never met. Twenty years later we did meet and eventually got married. (It took him a while to persuade me.)

Outside a supermarket in Nairobi, I met, quite by chance, a woman who had been a year below me at school in Scotland, about eight years previously.

Many years ago we sold the house we then lived in in Berkshire to a couple, whose parents, we then discovered not only lived in the same street in a village near Dover as my aunt and uncle but both women attended the same church and were firm friends.

On a camping holiday in France , the man in the tent next to us turned out to be the person who had helped my husband 10 years earlier when he had an accident. Same holiday, my husband noticed a car he recognised. He spoke to the owner who showed him the log book with his fathers name in it as a previous owner. Same holiday , in a supermarket, we literally 'bumped' into my cousin who I hadn't seen for 10 years. Same holiday, we were talking to a couple who live miles away from us, who on learning where we lived,told us they had grown up there and still had relatives in the next village.

In 1964 my then boyfriend's younger brother went to Australia as a £10-pom. He left behind a heart-broken girlfriend (he was VERY good-looking).

In 1976 he came back on his first visit home bringing his wife and son with him. We arranged to have a night out in a pub near where they used to live and met some friends there. Suddenly a woman came across the very crowded and busy bar and started talking to BinL and gave him something out of her bag. Then she left.

It turned out to be the girl he had left behind in 1964 - who had no idea he was home and he had no idea she was going to be in the pub. We had chosen it at random. She gave him a ring he had given her all those years ago. (Don't think his wife was impressed - they subsequently got divorced!)

I used to recognise people from home on most holidays (don't go away any more). I would never have got away with a secret dirty weekend!

DD once took a day trip to the coast and saw her boss who was supposedly off sick, hand-in-hand with a man who was not her husband.

shysal I hope she was diplomatic enough not to wave.

Did she get promoted?

She looked the other way and never said a word to anyone, except me of course!

My son and his grandfather went to Normandy for the 50th anniversity of D-Day during a celebration on the street my son encountered one of his school friends who was playing in the Marine band.

I have just found out that a fellow Gransnet Local Editor was brought up in the same town as me. Her sister went to school in the street where I lived and she went to the school my daughters attended.
She has since moved from Essex to Scotland, I am still in Essex.

Whilst living in New York I had two 'small world' incidents. I was taking my then toddler to the local YMCA for swimming lessons and got friendly with a Scottish girl. After some weeks we arranged to go to the local McDonald's afterwards. We exchanged surnames and phone numbers. Upon meeting again, she asked me if my husband had ever worked for a particular company ten years ago. He had and so had her husband they had worked together in London.
The other incident: a friend's relatives had been on holiday in Bournemouth and we visiting her with their slide show [remember those?] of their time there. I was invited to watch as my late MIL lived there and my husband was brought up there. I also had lived there for 5 month when my DD was born. Anyway, we watched the slides when up popped a couple they'd met on a boat with their two small boys. It was my friend Pauline her husband and said boys.

When I emailed my address to GNHQ last week, I discovered that one of the editors if I say who I might disappear in mysterious circumstances, went to Brownies just round the corner, and we both lived in the place in previous years!

same place duh!

When we lived in Solihull we had to go to London quite often and every time we did we bumped into not one but two people we knew just walking along the streets. It became so often that we started looking out for them. They were not together.

Saw a man reflected in a mirror in a palace in Jaipur. He was working out where he had seen us before and I was trying to work out where we had met. Beijing a few years before.

When DS1 went to Sheffield university, he discovered that the student in the next room, who was from Birmingham, had the same surname as my maiden name. We worked out that they shared a great, great, grandfather.

For a long period, it seemed that when ever we went on holiday we would bump into at least one of DH's patients, usually when the children were misbehaving The weirdest time was in a very small cafe, near the top of an alp!

One of our friends was invited to the wedding of a nephew only to discover the bride's uncle was someone with whom he had shared a house whilst at university 40 years previously.

When DD1 was at primary school she went to tennis lessons at the local courts and I got chatting to one of the other mums. She looked slightly familiar and it turned out she and I were in the same French class and she and DH in the same Russian class at St Andrews. Neither of us have any links to this area, other than chance. Same DD became friends with a girl at school who also lived quite near us and as they cahtted about parents one of them remarked that her father had been at school with HRH (Charles) So has mine said the other! We found that DH and her father had not only been in the same house, but were only 2 boys apart in the school house photograph. (I have to say DH said that the boy in question had been an obnoxious little git at the time, and he saw no reason to change his mind since!

All these concidences make me think how unlikely it is that the likes of Lord Lucan disappear entirely without trace. If I were on the run, I fear I would bump into someone from our village, or someone I was at school with or the window cleaner's BIL within half an hour!

We have an unusual surname and when DS went to university we were amazed to find another student with the same surname on the same staircase (with only 10 rooms). They became good friends although we could find no familial connection. The other student had the same forename as DH.

When I had early retirement in London I was told by several people nobody in their right mind would go to Birmingham.
I went to Birmingham to join my father and 2 daughters who went to Birmingham City University and settled in Birmingham.
I am now in contact with about a dozen people who worked in the same building who have now retired who I did not know had any connection with Birmingham when I worked in London and they are now living within 15 miles of Birmingham.
One lives in Solihull in an equivalent house to mine. As he was starting fresh he said that he went for Solihull as the areas surrounding Solihull are a bit more pleasant but he has said if he had inherited a house in Sutton Coldfield he would have lived in it.
He likes Sutton Coldfield / Lichfield and visits both occasionally.

Frank