on holiday in France, stopped in the smallest petrol station in a tiny village and when my mum got out the car someone shouted her name - was a family from the same village as us. mad
on holiday in Italy age 15, bumped into the guitar player from my band, he was staying in the same campsite as us.
when i started my new job this year, a woman on my team kept looking at me as if she knew me from somewhere for the first few weeks, and finally when we were both having a cig outside she came over and said, “still on the ket?” mischievously, and i realised she is my mate’s mum. she once caught us both racking lines while we were getting ready for a night out i hadn’t seen him in years when i started this job. anyway she’s lovely, and thanks to her i’ve reconnected with my pal, meeting tomorrow night in fact. no ket this time tho
Went to Poland once, walked into a bar and the guy who served us was from Whalley Range.
Might not seem that bizarre, but we’d got the wrong train, got lost, been refused entry to a couple of places and were pisswet through so dived in the last pub, and the lad was from quite literally a house i could shout to from my flat window at home.
Last year I was in India and on a commuter boat in the Kerala backwaters when an ex bf got on and sat right next to me. I pretended to be asleep for a whole hour to avoid having to say hello. He messaged me on Facebook afterwards to call me out on it, kill me now
I was in Athens, walking along the street and a man walking in my direction looked familiar. We both looked at each other, open mouthed. We didn’t know each other as such - we were always on the Tube station platform at the same time every morning going to work.
Sitting on the balcony of my AirB&B apartment in the old town of Valencia and a mate who lives in Hitchen is on the pavement down below shouting my name.
This one doesn’t technically count, but i used to work in a call centre and once spoke to a customer who i didn’t know, but who had the same postcode as me and lived a few doors down the road. When she gave me her postcode so i could look up her order it felt like my brain was echoing and i genuinely questioned my sanity for a brief moment.
When my sister started uni in Scotland she got a job in the students’ union shop and got chatting to another girl who was working there. Turns out they’d been to the same nursery. In Paraguay.
First time I went to uni in 2006 in Liverpool there was a girl working in the nearest Tesco express that I recognised from college. I remember her dropping something on the floor and then did that thing where you fail repeatedly to pick it up for some reason and she muttered ‘fucks sake’. I quit uni.
Went back to uni in 2014, this time in Manchester. Guess who’s working in the local Tesco Express? That’s right, Jane McDonald. No, it was that same girl except she was now the manager, asking one of her staff to do something. Thank you for taking the time to read this amazing post that barely belongs in this thread.
Above post reminds me, once walked into a pub and there was some sort of paper on the floor. Thought it might be money so picked it up. It was a receipt, from the place i was working at the time, from someone i’d served earlier that day, with my name at the bottom under operator, etc. Weird as fuck. The pub was at least a mile away as well, with at least a dozen inbetween. Odds of that?
once saw someone I went to primary school with and sort of stayed in touch a little bit get frogmarched out of a club I was in, in coventry, throwing up over himself. the club was scholars if anyone is interested.
Over the years, I seem to keep going to the same small gigs/places as music journalist Laura Snapes, both in Cornwall and Manchester. I spoke to her once years ago and she was very encouraging about me doing writing.