Would You Believe It? Nos.1 to 3

In a week that has seen the arrival of the seven-billionth inhabitant of our planet, I found myself pondering some of the astonishing coincidences that I have seen in the last thirty years, in a population of mere millions.

No 1
In 1976 our family was dispersed around the world. My parents had been visiting us in Mallorca, and were six hours late leaving for England with their flight delayed by violent storms. My sister was living in Dubai, and made an unscheduled trip back to England on the spur of the moment. In an age without mobile phones, and without any knowledge that the others were travelling, they bumped into each other in a crowded Terminal 4 at Heathrow.

No. 2
In the 1980s I had a woodworking business in the centre of Birmingham, and took on a new member of staff from a Skill Centre. (Remember them?). This chap had been a navigator in the rapidly-shrinking merchant navy, and had re-trained as a carpenter/joiner. He lived in Walsall, some seven or eight miles to the west of the city.
On the way over to his first job in Solihull, some seven or eight miles to the east of the city, I gave him strict instructions to keep his mouth shut: I did not particularly want the client to know that he was new to the business. Not good for confidence, you understand. The job was a timber conservatory roof, round at the back of the property. While I was showing my new man what was required of him, the client - a chap in his early forties, I guess - stepped out of the kitchen door, looked at my new employee and said "What are you doing here? You were in the merchant navy last time I saw you".
Said client was an insurance salesman, and my new chippie had been one of his clients. Would you believe it? There were seven million inhabitants in the West Midlands conurbation, and I picked two that knew each other, despite living fourteen miles apart with England's second-city between them.

No. 3
A few years ago my wife and I were walking the Coleridge Way in Somerset with friends. At one rural B&B we were joined at breakfast by another couple from somewhere down south, and exchanged some polite conversation, during which our home town came up. "Oh!, I lived there once." said the chap. "I used to keep my horse in K**** H*******." (a village just south of the town). "That's a coincidence." says I. "We lived there, too, until a few years ago". He then mentioned the name of the chap from whom we bought our house. To cut a long story short, it turned out that our new acquaintance had kept his horse in the stable of the barnyard of the house we had bought twenty years before.
Coincidence, or what?