Coincidence #1
In 2008 I spent 3 mo in SE Asia. I went to the tourist office in Malacca, southern Malaysia, to find somewhere nice to stay for a few days. They suggested a b&b in the historic area where 'fluent English is spoken'. They booked for me and I got a taxi to it.
Very pleasant bloke opens the door, introduces himself. He's Pete, Chinese Malaysian and speaks perfect English with a slight northern accent. He shows me to my room, asks me where I'm from. 'Well I was born and brought up in the NW of England but I've lived all over the world.'
him 'Oh, where in the north west?'
me 'near such and such a town'
him 'really? where did you go to school? My wife's from that area.'
me 'XYZ Grammar School'
him (going to the bottom of the stairs) 'Jan! Jan! Come down! You and this lady might know each other ...!
We did! Not well - we were in different 'streams' but still ...!
Small world.
Coincidence #2
On leaving school, Jan'd gone into tourism/hotel management. Pete, had won a scholarship to a Swiss patisserie school from his catering college in Malaysia, then got a job in London at one of the big hotels where Jan was doing some sort of hotel management 'internship' - probably an apprenticeship 'back in the day'; that's where they'd first met but it was literally just a meeting of all the new employees/apprentices. Nothing other than a bit of friendly chatter that was exchanged between all the 'lowly' staff in their breaks and so on.
About 10 years later Jan had gone out to manage a luxury beach resort at Langkawi and found Pete there as head of Patisserie; the 'rest is history' as they say and they'd got married in England at the end of the holiday season. After a few years they came back to England and ran a couple of upmarket pub/restaurants in Cheshire before deciding to semi-retire back in Malaysia.
Coincidence # 3
One evening over coffee, talking about school, Jan said to me, do you remember Beth Jones who wanted to be a nanny but went to be a nurse? I often wondered what happened to her ...
So I told her that (by another odd coincidence, which is a long story) I'd met Beth in the early 1970s when I was working in Austria; she'd done her RSCN at Great Ormond Street and was employed by an extremely wealthy family, one of whose children was very unwell with some chronic disease; she had met a Scotsman called Dave Unusual-Surname and was engaged, so I assumed she'd be long since married and maybe divorced a few times by now ...
'Dave Unusual-Surname?' interrupted Pete.
'Yes ... why?'
'Was he a bit older than her and us?' asked Pete
'Yeah, I did get the impression he was. Maybe about 10 years which seemed like a lot back then. Why?'
'Did she say what he did for a living? I think I might know him.'
So I told him what she'd told me how they'd met and where ...
Yes, Pete had known him - he'd met him when he'd been sent to an exclusive hotel in Zermatt to do some of his work experience during his Patisserie scholarship; he said he'd been very kind to him, a stranger in a very strange land, very early in a very intensive course, when so many hotel managers could be really very heartless to the junior kitchen staff.
