"In the explanation of ‘coincidence’ there is much of laziness." Charles Fort

FT101: I have always assumed that coincidences of the sort that you report happened to other people: that is, they happened to one other person among billions, providing just of the sort of frequency at which such freakish events should occur. Once it happens to you, your perceptions change. Nothing too remarkable: I took my partner’s camera in for repair and the repair agency told me it would have to be sent overseas to the manufacturer. I left a hastily scrawled contact telephone number, so scrawled that the last digit looked like a nine rather than a four. Two weeks, at least, said the agency. Don’t ring us, we’ll ring you.

A week later I was making a visit to another office, one that I visit 15 minutes in an average month. The phone rang and the secretary said, in a puzzled tone, "Yes he’s here," and handed the phone to me with an "It’s for you". It was the repair agency and the camera was ready unexpectedly early.

How anyone in my usual office had known where to put the call through I could not understand, since I hadn’t told them where I would be. Only subsequently, after being told that indeed no-one had put a phone-call through, did I recall that the telephone number of the office I was visiting was identical to mine, except that the last digit was a nine instead of a four. Paul Henderson, London.

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FT103: Back in 1985, a business I was running was in a very bad way financially. I managed to conceal my problems from my parents, being determined to battle through on my own and not cause them concern.

My mother called me one Sunday morning, offering me some cash totally out of the blue. I declined the offer, but she said "I want to give it to you before I die", which was a very strange statement to come from my perfectly healthy mother. I went to my parents’ home that afternoon to find my mother reminiscing over the "old days", which was another strange shift in her outlook. I left the house at 2:30pm and precisely an hour later my mother rose from her chair, collapsed and died from a heart attack. At the inquest it was declared that she had been perfectly fit, with no evidence of any previous heart trouble.

After the funeral 10 days later, I went back to my parents’ house for the wake. On the mantelpiece sat a carriage clock driven by four revolving bearings. I remember that as a young lad of four I had been mesmerised by the to-and-fro action of the clock’s mechanism. It had never broken down or stopped in the 40 years that it had been on the mantelpiece -–until the day of the funeral. It stopped at 3:30pm, the time of the funeral and the exact time my mother had died.

It remained stuck at 3:30 for five years until one afternoon, sitting with my father, I noticed that it was now showing 10:30. I mentioned this to my father who said that he’d cleaned it that morning and must have freed the jammed mechanism. However, it moved no more. The next morning, my father went shopping, fell down and died from a heart attack at 10:30am. The clock now sits in my house and has never moved since that time. C N Satterthwaite, Solihull, West Midlands.

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FT109: Paul Henderson’s letter [FT101:51] about coincidences reminded me of a recent event that happened on a particularly boring day in the laboratory where I work. A few of us were listening to the local oldies radio station from Edinburgh, and the song playing was pointed out by one of the technicians as being the number one song on the day she was born. Two songs later, and the same thing happened regarding another of the technicians. As the incident was being discussed another girl came into the laboratory and asked what was going on. We told her about the coincidence, and she looked up her birthday number one in the book we were using. It turned out to be "Because the Night", by Patti Smith – the very song that was playing on the radio at that moment. The other two songs, gleaned from The Top Twenty Official Record Charts 1955-1982 by Tony Jasper, were "Metal Guru" (T Rex 10 June 1972) and "Bye Bye Baby" (Bay City Rollers 27 April 1975). Peter Telford, Musselburgh, East Lothian.

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 FT109: Your item about the Lynmouth flood of 1952 made fascinating reading [FT108:10]. Hanging on the hallway wall of the house in Manchester in which I lived since my infancy (from 1924 onwards) were two large sepia prints, the subjects of which I had no idea about until 15 August 1952. On this night I was awakened by a crash downstairs. I went down to find one picture smashed all over the floor and I decided to leave it until the morning, at which time I swept up all the glass. Before I could pick up the picture though, the paperboy pushed the daily newspaper through the letterbox and it fell onto the floor. Retrieving both items I was surprised to find that one depicted "The Sea at Lynmouth" whilst the other reported the flooding. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Frank Derrick, Warlingham, Surrey.

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 FT124: Thirty years ago when I was in my early teens, I set up a little photographic darkroom in my parents’ house. By doing newspaper rounds and the like, I was able to buy a photographic enlarger and an enlarger lens, only to find that the two were incompatible – an adaptor ring was required. No photographic dealer seemed to have one in stock, and I was too young and impatient to place an order. A few days later my parents and I went to shop in Swansea, where there were several dealers in second-hand photographic equipment. However no shop stocked a suitable adaptor ring.

At the end of the day, while we were walking back to the car, I noticed a small blue and white cardboard box lying in the gutter. It contained the correct adaptor ring.

The only obvious explanation – that my parents had somehow "arranged" this surprise, can be discounted. Good people as they were, they knew nothing about the technicalities of my hobby and cared even less. Viv Hobbs, Blackwood, Gwent.

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 FT129: Having read Peter Telford and Alan Gardiner’s letters on coincidence [FT109:52], I’m writing to tell you about a bizarre series of events that happened to me eight or nine years ago. It began one Sunday morning when I read a story by Ray Bradbury called (if I remember correctly) The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone. This contains a reference to a pre-war novelist called Thomas Wolfe, of whom I had not previously heard, but vaguely confused with the contemporary writer Tom Wolfe.

That afternoon I visited my friend Scot, and in the course of our conversation he said: "Have you ever read any Thomas Wolfe?". Before I could reply he added "I mean the thirties novelist, not the guy who wrote The Right Stuff". I told him that I had come across his name for the first time only that morning and had been mildly puzzled about it since, and Scot said something about how it’s funny these things happen. "It’s what Jung called synchronicity," I said (incorrectly), a word with which Scot was apparently unfamiliar.

A few weeks later I came across a second-hand copy of Tom (not Thomas) Wolfe’s Electric Kool Aid Acid Test in a charity shop. I bought it and on getting it home noticed that it was entirely unannotated except for one sentence referring to Jung’s theory of synchronicity which was underlined, and a note about it made on the inside back cover. Some days later Scot came round to my flat, and I mentioned this book to him, he picked it up and it fell open at the page with the underlined sentence.

The strangest thing about all this in hindsight is that, in this case, the Cosmic Joker seemed to be acting as a Cosmic Teacher, the lesson going something like this: "I see, O’Callaghan, that like a lot of woolly-minded people you do not understand the difference between coincidence, an apparent or imagined connection between two random events, and synchronicity, a series of events that appear to be causally related. Coming across a previously unknown novelist twice in one day is simple coincidence; as for true synchronicity, allow me to give you a practical demonstration…" T L O’Callaghan, Norwich, Norfolk.

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I asked for directions to a particular shop. "Stay here please," she said, gazing at me. "I’ll see if it’s open." She disappeared round the corner and moments later returned to tell me that it was.

"Why are you so kind to me?" I asked, giving her my thanks. "Well," she answered smiling, "because you look exactly like my son Jeff". She pulled out a photo of him from her purse. It was a good likeness of me, though a bit younger. He had on a check shirt, exactly like the one I had some years ago! Cyrus Ganjavi, Mazandaran, Iran.

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FT130: Sometime in the 1970’s I took a young fellow fishing in my small boat at Felixtowe in Suffolk. As we pushed off from the stony beach, the gunwale pulled his late father’s heavy gold ring from his finger and it fell into the water.

Although we had a good day, he was almost in tears. Fog came down and we decided to make for the shore, using the compass. As luck would have it, we hit the beach at the very spot we had left it. As the lad was in the bows ready to hold her steady, with one leg over on the shingle, he gave a shout and came up beaming, holding his father’s ring. R G Rudd, Ipswich, Suffolk.

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 FT130: On my wife’s birthday (17 May 1999), at about 8:30pm, I handed her several presents. One of these was the recently-published 1998 edition of The Complete Book of Practical Gardening (Lorenz Books). She then settled down to watch the first episode of the ITV drama An Evil Streak starring Trevor Eve. About half an hour into the programme, it was revealed the lead female protagonist was celebrating her birthday, at which point she was presented with a present by her mother. This was revealed to be The Complete Book of Practical Gardening, the distinctive front cover clearly showing it to be exactly the same edition as the one I had just given my wife. Peter Charles, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire.

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 FT131: I am a milkman and on arrival at the dairy one day I discovered I was short of a Nimble loaf of bread, a customer’s regular weekly order. I drove 15 miles to my first call, arriving at 2am. Lying in the middle of the road was the exact Nimble loaf I needed, fresh and in perfect condition. M Jenner, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire.

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 FT139: I am a college lecturer and a couple of years ago one of my mature students was researching, for the final part of his course, a self-initiated project exploring and illustrating the history and spiritual beliefs of the inhabitants of the island of St Kilda. He was having difficulty finding information about the particular aspects and historic period which he wanted to focus on, so I recommended a book by Martin Martin who travelled around and documented the Scottish islands in the 17^th Century.

At the local library the student was informed that the book was in the catalogue but had been borrowed a very long time ago and not returned. When he went home from the library his parents, who were redecorating, were waiting for his help to move their piano. It had a castor missing and for as long as he could remember it had been propped up by an old book. On removing the book, he was astonished to find it was A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland, circa 1695 by Martin Martin, due to be returned to the local library in April 1947. Mazda Munn, Innellan, Argyll.

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 FT141: When I was eight years old living in Chicago, Illinois, I went to the corner store to buy milk. I really wanted a Milky Way bar; they were ten cents back then and I had no money to spare. I lugged the milk home and as I got to our apartment door, it began to hail. I liked to pick up hail stones and put them in the freezer to try and keep them. I began gathering stones. Then I saw an odd grey one. Something was inside and I melted it in my mittened hand to find I was holding an American Mercury head dime. I looked up, thanked God and went back in the hail storm to buy my Milky Way. David St Albans (by email).

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 FT144: On the death of my father on 5 April 1967 in Natal, South Africa, both my sister Muriel, living in Holland, and myself, living in England, were informed. My sister got in touch with her husband, Martin Van Den Hurk, who was on business in Portugal, and he made arrangements to go to South Africa right away. He flew to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where he had a four hour wait for a South African Airways flight to Johannesburg.

He bought an SA Airways postcard at the airport showing holidaymakers on the beach at Margate, Natal, and sent it to Muriel. It was she who noticed that the photograph showed our father, dressed in white jacket and grey slacks, walking up the beach. There was absolutely no doubt it was him. Muriel kept the card until her death five years ago. It is now in my possession. Jim Wilson, Fleetwood, Lancashire.