It's a small world!

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Sh4rkyBloke

Jaffa Cake monster
Location
Manchester, UK
A lass I went out with years ago went to a party of her Cousin whom she'd never met (family feud years before she was even born meant that parts of the family no longer kept contact). The party invitation had come via some other family member who she'd just recently made contact with via her Grandmother (in a bid to patch up the rift that separated people who had nothing to do with it)... anyways, I went to the party with her so she had someone she knew and we could go if things were stilted/awkward.

We drove from Derby to Preston and she cautiously knocked on the door.... the door opened and I said "Hi Lisa, small world"... my GF's long lost Cousin was a lass on my college course who sat a couple of seats away from me. Bizarre.

Slightly more tenuous was the fact that Lisa's Best mate was also on our course and shared the same Birthday as me.
 

HelenD123

Legendary Member
Location
York
An ex of mine from many years ago who lives down in Brighton randomly met a friend of mine on holiday a couple of years ago. When he heard where she was from he said he knew someone called Helen from there and the rest is history. Weirdly they ended up dating for a while as well. I'm still in touch with him so the three of us met up for dinner in Brighton a few months ago and had a lovely evening.
 

ChrisKH

Guru
Location
Essex
Well while we're on the Australia thing, I spent three weeks there touring round. At the airport on the way out, I realised I hadn't any reading material so picked the first interesting thing I could find which was "Notes from a Small Island" by Bill Bryson. I read it over the next three weeks (as did Mrs KH) and on the last day we were having a departing brunch in a hotel in Perth before the 24hr flight home. The restaurant was empty save one studious soul reading a book at a corner table. It was of course Mr. Bryson on a researching trip for his book "Down Under".
 
OP
OP
Dayvo

Dayvo

just passin' through
June 1994; I was on a day off from work and walking around the new and posh marina in Oslo.

I saw a bloke walking towards me (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Boris Johnson) and said to a workmate I was with, 'He looks just like my old second row partner from comprehensive school.' He got nearer and we both started to smile, like the schoolboy friends we once were. He was on a whistle-stop business trip and had just finished.
Five hours later, and lots of beer, we parted company and said we must keep in touch, and that I would contact him next time I was back in Brentwood.

Needless to say, I didn't.

Fast-forward to June 2005, and I had been staying with a mate and his family in Holland for a long weekend. Got to Amsterdam airport waiting for my flight back to Stockholm, and who should I see coming towards me with four pints of beer? Yep; but this time he only had an hour before his flight so we downed the beers quickly!

Wonder where/when I'll see him next? :sad:
 

ChrisKH

Guru
Location
Essex
Crikey I haven't seen my school second-row partner since, well, school! We had some real scraps with the other schools in Essex...........now where's that black eye smilie? :sad:
 

ChrisKH

Guru
Location
Essex
Dayvo said:
How old are you, Chris, and which school did you go to?

I'm 48 and went to Hedley Walter Comp. in Brentwood.


45. Furtherwick Park Comprehensive, Canvey (not that I usually admit that openly). The only non-London school to have a London weighting and danger money for teachers. :biggrin:

I don't recall us playing schools in Brentwood, I must admit, but we did play against the following:-

Cornelius Vermoyden (Canvey)
Westcliff High School for Boys (Westcliff, obviously)
Campions (East London)
Deanes (Rayleigh/Hadleigh)
The Fitzwymarc School (Rayleigh)
Coopers and Coburn School ( Upminster) - My senior team were Coopers Old Boys, Upminster from aged 26 to 35.
Upminster School
Barstable School (Basildon)
Fryerns School, Basildon (78 - 0 on the first and last occasion I recall ; Ref reduced it to 20 minutes in the second half to keep the score down)
Many others I can't remember.

Truth is, I'm not really a second row but I was one of the tallest in my year so was "volunteered". Wanted to play flanker (as I did when I left school) but they gave that position to the small football players who could run fast! Target school was always Westcliff High School who we hadn't beaten in a number of years. We finally laid that one to rest on a wet and wendy afternoon at Westcliff in 1978. :biggrin:
 

Keith Oates

Janner
Location
Penarth, Wales
A few weeks ago I went to a bar in Singapore and was there a while having a drink with a mate when the door opened and one of my old mates from Hong Kong came throught he door, I hadn't seen him for about ten years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 

ChrisKH

Guru
Location
Essex
Keith Oates said:
A few weeks ago I went to a bar in Singapore and was there a while having a drink with a mate when the door opened and one of my old mates from Hong Kong came throught he door, I hadn't seen him for about ten years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Unbeknown to me, a guy I used to play rugby with had transferred out to Singapore and worked there for two years.

I was on the way home reading the Evening Standard reading about the Bali bombings and in the paper it had a picture of a board in a Bali hospital with people's names on it. "Chris Bradford" was written on the board and I dismissed it mentally as there must be loads of people with that name and anyway what would he be doing in Bali?

My brother rang me when I got home to tell me Chris had been on a rugby sevens tour in Bali from Singapore and was in Paddy's Bar when the bomb went off. To his credit I am told he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and carrying an ironing board (to surf on). He was a better player than I ever was.
 

ColinJ

Puzzle game procrastinator!
(It's a while back now, so I might have got the countries wrong, but the gist of the story is true.)

My sister was on her honeymoon at a hotel in a small town in Italy. She was sitting with her husband when she heard English voices at a nearby table, so she went over, said hello, and got into a conversation with the couple. The four of them got on well and they spent quite a bit of time together over the following week, then they said their farewells.

A few years later, my sister and her husband were stopping at a hotel in a small town in France. She was sitting with her husband when she heard the sound of English voices at a nearby table, so she went over, said hello, and got into a conversation with the... same couple ;)! Yeah, small world...
 

Bigtallfatbloke

New Member
My sons classmate went on holiday to Australia...some small town out in the back of beyond (to visit relatives)...walking along the street he bumped into their head teacher:ohmy:
 

MarkF

Guru
Location
Yorkshire
Late 90's. Hadn't seen my neighbour, "Bill" around for a few days, saw his wife though and asked after him, he was on a contract "working away".

I went on holiday a few days later, to Corfu, hired a trail bike and spent a nice day travelling around the Island, went up, forgotten it's name, where the glacier is and stopped to take a pic. A car pulled up and "Bill" got out, with someone other than his wife, I turned away but he was determined that somebody should take a pic of them, cue dropped faces all round.;)
 

radger

Veteran
Location
Bristol
About six years ago, I was in New Zealand, and I went caving near Lake Taupo. Part of this exercise involved getting in a wetsuit and floating around in an inner tube (from a truck, not a bike ;)), and as there were several of us tourists doing this, you had to put your legs over the shoulders of someone and make a sort of tube snake for one part of the cave system.

When signing the disclaimer for this shenanigans, I had noticed the person before me's hometown was very close to the one I grew up in, but thought nothing more of it.

Later in the day, in the youth hostel, I accused someone of looking like someone I went to school with. "Where did you go to school?" says he. I answer, and the response was, "I didn't go there, but my mate Tom did." Turned out that the lad whose shoulders I'd had my knees over was the from-near-my-hometown bloke, and not only that, had been in my class ten years earlier, before moving to another school
 
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