The Daily Novel

One of the things I learnt when I was looking into theories like Jung’s sychronicity is that co-incidence often happens. The statisticians have proved it with massive computer models based on large sample studies. But when they happen to you it is still pretty mind-boggling. Even the sceptical begin to wonder whether there is an Unseen Hand which is controlling our lives, or a President of the Immortals who is having his sport with vulnerable human beings like Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the Durbervilles.

Last night we went out to dinner to a neighbour up the street. It was by way of a celebration of her engagement to a jovial Spaniard. The only other guest was a woman called Jane, who, as it happens is teaching little Dulcie in the nursery over on the Holloway Road. Jane is also tying the knot next weekend (marriage must be back in fashion). She is marrying a bloke called Michael in Lichfield, which was the seat of the bishopric of my youth, which included Wolverhampton. It was the Bishop of Lichfield who confirmed me about sixty years ago, when my aunt hoped that I would enter the church and channel my talkativeness into weekly sermons.

They are getting married in Lichfield because Michael is a Wolverhampton lad. He came from the Claregate area where Billy Wright, perhaps the best player ever in the long history of Wolverhampton Wanderers, lived in my youth. I used to go round reguarly on a Sunday afternoon, ostensibly to see an aunt who lived there but really in the hope of getting a glimpse of my blonde god, whose head bobbed above all the other heads, although he was not a tall man. Michael had no idea that Billy Wright had once lived there. By the time Michael grew up Billy Wright had moved south to manage Arsenal and marry one of the Beverley sisters. He was the David Beckham of his day.

Michael did not go to the Wolverhampton Municipal Grammar School like me, because by the time he grew up it had been abolished. He went to a school that had not even been invented in my youth. Jane then discovered that my wife, like her, had been brought up in Watford, and that they had gone to the same school. Watford Grammar School for girls has been going for just over 400 years and shows no sign of being closed down, or even forced to take boys as well as girls. Incredibly,  given the age gap, they had been taught by several of the same teachers. But then teachers tend to stay around a long time at Watford Grammar rather than moving every few years to up their salaries.

Since both Wolvehampton and Watford a quite big towns it is statistically probable that there are other Wolverhampton boys who have married Watford girls. And so the fact that two such couples met in Gospel Oak on Saturday night is probably just co-incidence. But next weekend when I am down in Dorset I shall be gazing up at the stormy clouds over Egdon Heath and wondering whether there is a chance that the statisticians  have got it wrong. Perhaps there is someone up there who is organising such encounters and listening to the conversations they provoke around  Saturday night dinner tables.