It’s A Small World

Big Joe Corrigan said:
Did you call the ripped bloke a ****?
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No, because he didn’t escalate things when I pushed back, and because his girlfriend intervened straight away - but I would have done if it had gone differently.

If you’re going to call a meathead a ****, the security section at the airport is probably the safest place you can do it!
 
Vienna_70 said:
Also, while in Pau, a squaddie came into the bar I frequented down there. We got talking, and it turned out he had a season ticket at Maine Road in the same row in the same block as me. I saw him at the old ground during the next season.
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You've just reminded me of another one. I was freelancing and went down to Norwich for an interview for a contract. The guy interviewing me asked if I supported City or United so I told him. He got his season card out to show me, and he sat a few rows in front of me in 102 (which is where I sat in the early years at the Etihad. Even funnier, I was offered the contract but turned it down in favour of another contract at Barclaycard. Out of politeness, I emailed the Norwich guy to tell him, and it turned out I'd be working with his brother.

As part of that Barclaycard contract I spent some time working in their Collections centre in Kirkby. A few years later I did another contract with Barclays, this time based at Radbroke Hall near Knutsford. The guy who came down to meet me on my first day looked at me and said "I've seen you in Kirkby" and he used to sit in the same part of the office as I did. He took me up to meet the team and one of them was another former colleague I hadn't seen for about 15 years.

My daughter started High School and before she started, some friends mentioned that some friends of theirs had a daughter starting the same school. One her first day, the girls were sat in alphabetical order and were asked to get to know the girl sat next to them, and intrioduce them to the class. As my daughter was sat next to one of her primary school pals =, the teacher moved them, and she ended up sat next to this girl we'd been told about by our friends. They then became (and still are over 20 years later) great friends. But when I went to Lauren's house to pick her up when my daughter had been there, I met her mum and dad, and I knew her mum from somewhere. It turned out that her brother was a neighbour of ours but, even more bizarrely, her dad and uncle were old friends of my dad's from their boyhood days, as our grandparents were next door neighbours.
 
One more.

Just after I graduated in 20p3, I spent a few days back in Cornwall visiting my parents and family.

On the Sunday, we went for a meal in one of the hotels in Falmouth. Among the waiting staff was a Polish couple.

A couple of weeks later, I flew from Stansted to Berlin to visit some of the friends I’d made, while at Potsdam. Directly in front of me in the queue to board the plane was the Polish couple, who’d been among the waiting staff at the hotel in Falmouth.
 
My Mum went to drop some stuff off at the charity shop last week. Heard the womans accent and asked where she was originally from.
Turned out she lived on Partington street (the street that my school was on) around the corner from us in Failsworth.
Now Mum is going back this week to stalk her a bit and get some more info..

Also, someone on here p.m'd me a while back about something and it turned out his brother now owns/lives in the house that I grew up in in Failsworth.
 
My wife-to-be is from London. She lived in Manchester for three years while she was at uni, between 2015 and 2018, but even that was only for a few months each year - she went home every summer and for Easter. Anyway, remember this for later. She did live in Manchester but she was frequently back in London and her boyfriend at the time was based down south too.

I'm coeliac, so I was (and remain) a frequent diner at Sweet Mandarin, the (mostly) gluten-free Chinese place that's in the Northern Quarter. I used to live basically round the corner from the restaurant as well while I was at uni, so I was in there basically every weekend with my then-girlfriend between 2013 and 2016-ish. We got to know the staff really well and even ended up at one of their weddings because we were in there so often.

Me and that girlfriend broke up early 2017. I met my wife-to-be not long after.

We'd been together for a couple of years when she moved up here permanently in late 2019... just as the pandemic hit. So I never got a chance to take her to Sweet Mandarin before all hell broke loose. When restrictions lifted, it was one of the first places I wanted to take her because she'd never been before. When we got there, however, my partner realised she had been there once before, years ago, with her ex-boyfriend, around 2015/2016.

We've worked out that we were probably both eating at Sweet Mandarin on the same Saturday night, both sat with our ex-partners, obviously with no idea that either of us were in there or that we'd be getting married about a decade later. Hardly a mind-blowing coincidence but considering my partner's born and bred around Wembley and had no reason to go to a gluten-free Chinese, we've always liked that our story probably unexpectedly began way before we thought.
 
When we lived in Spain I was looking for someone to build me a simple web site and so asked around. Someone suggested I find a guy called Chris.........it was afterall in a tiny one horse town in a national park literally in the middle of nowhere, miles from anywhere. I found him through the grapevine of dodgy expats. We met in a small hotel by a roundabout and that's all I knew, I waited. A bloke who looked English approached and we intrduced ourselves. After about 10 minutes he asked me if we'd met before....No, and carried on talking. Again, he asked, No.....
He asked me where we lived before, Sale....Oh I lived in Knutsford he said but it was still a No from me.
Turned out he recognised my face and accent and asked about my dad....He and his wife used to visit my dad regularly, my dad lived in Mobberley and this guys kids played on his train set.

Aaaand, we had paying guests staying and got talking one day. Turns out she used to go in the same pubs, was once married to my best mate years ago and my dad insured his very first moped. They used to come over twice a year after that for holidays and fishing trips on the river with his mates.
 
In the early late 50s, I went with my dad and uncle to a City away game at Sheffield. At half-time my dad went for a pee, whilst in the queue, a guy tapped him on the shoulder, "I think I recognise you, we were stable lads at Newmarket", almost 40 years ago.
They kept in touch with exchanging visits until the friend's death a few years later.
 
Went to college in Stockport with a lad from marple.
Roughly 1995 ish.
Never saw home again from the day we finished college.
20 years later.
I'm at the carousel in Mombasa waiting for me case.
Tap on my shoulder.
Ay up blue how are ya.
Never seen him since

Then another one in a bar in Cancun.
A bloke came up to me asked if I was from Buxton as he played football against me once when we played a team from bakewell.
Like you say small world
 
Down the narrow streets of Venice, bumped into an American who lived in my halls of residence during my first year of university in York.
 
When i was based on Hong Kong, I looked after a patient who was teaching at a school that the kids of parents in the forces went too. Turned out she had taught at my Senior School and new some of the teachers that had taught me.
 
In Porto for the final. Sat having a beer on the Friday afternoon, got chatting to some Chelsea fans from Surrey. They mentioned Sutton United so my lad mentioned Stockport who were in the same league at the time. The Chelsea lads, said oh we always stay in Stockport when we play City, got a good mate who always looks after us up there, do you know him? I thought do I bollocks, but asked his name, turns out I went to school with him.
 
Was in new york when went to the shop on the corner near the hotel as id forgotten my shaving stuff. When I asked the bloke behind the counter if they had any razors he was abit taken aback with my accent, turns out he was from moston two streets away from my mum and dads house.
 
a few weeks ago i was on the planet mars for the day.

thinking i was alone i decided to have an outdoors wank.

out of the blue, over the edge of a crater came my old physics tutor, miss beauregard, completely naked.

i had always fancied her back then,
but the lack of gravity on mars
and the age of her old tiddies left me quite unresolved.

it's a small solar system.
 
calumdown said:
a few weeks ago i was on the planet mars for the day.

thinking i was alone i decided to have an outdoors wank.

out of the blue, over the edge of a crater came my old physics tutor, miss beauregard, completely naked.

i had always fancied her back then,
but the lack of gravity on mars
and the age of her old tiddies left me quite unresolved.

it's a small solar system.
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I watched you from behind that red sand berm
 
I recently bumped into a bloke in Manila that I was mates with in junior school 55 years ago.
Turns out we both own land about a mile apart in the middle of the Philippines.
 
More like Murphy's law but years ago, right after I started working I had a hearing in a different part of NYC. I got what I wanted at the hearing, had some celebratory beers at lunch then went to the subway to head back to the office. Subway door opened up and there was my dad right in front of me in a black suit. Apparently he was going to work late on a different train because he was at a funeral that morning. My dad's a proper Catholic and didn't seem happy to see me enjoying myself at noon on a work day, to put it mildly.

There's trains every few minutes on that line and something like 750k people ride it every day, so I always ask myself what the odds not only that we would end up on the same train line, but at the same door and on the same odd timing.
 
In February 2010 I started a new job teaching English as a Foreign Language in Asunción, Paraguay. The owner of the school said, "We have another teacher from England called John." We eventually met a few days later and started to chat and realised that not only were we both from Manchester but we also slowly realised that we recognised each other. After talking for a few minutes more we discovered that we used to go into The Fletcher Moss in Didsbury on a Friday night at the same time but we never chatted as we were in 2 different groups of friends.
 
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