It’s A Small World

Always Ali said:
After the Brighton game, I went for a curry in Romiley with my daughter, a mate and his brother who she'd never met before, who was visiting from Nairobi. We were talking and he asked my daughter about university and where she went (Leeds). He said he knows a family from Nairobi who have a daughter at Leeds Uni and that she's changed her course as she wasn't happy with it. My daughter asked her name as she knew a girl who'd just done that. He named her and it was the same girl who my daughter is good friends with, and who is part of her cheerleading stunt squad.
Small world.
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Rules....
 
I got dragged to Florida to chauffer my mrs and her mate around.
After a particularly heavy night they wanted to go to some god-awful water park so with hangover in full effect and grumbling like Victor Meldrew off we went.
The place was massive and rammed out with screaming kids running around having fun, whereas i was feeling rougher by the minute. Pushing through the hoards i ran straight into a bloke.
''Sorry mate.'' I said
''No problem.'' Came the reply, followed by, ''Nice T-shirt.''
Something clicked in my head so i looked up, took my hat and shades off and checked the guy out.
It was my best mate from Manchester who i hadn't seen for 20 years since he moved to America. We were both that gobsmacked (and being mithered by kids) that after a quick ''fucking hell'' we carried on our seperate ways.
An hour later a big fuck off rainstorm swept in and the park rides where shut. There was one tiny bar in the whole place so it was straight into that. Sure enough, my old mate also rocked up there and we spent a happy rainsoaked afternoon catching up on the last two decades.
 
Went to stay with one of my mates for a cycling event who had invited his cousin to come to it as well. Started chatting to him and we seemed to know a few people in common. Turned out he was married to an ex girl friend of mine.
 
Copied from the last small world thread:


Went to Majorca and my sister made friends with someone. A year later in a different resort we saw her walking down the street.

In Goa we saw my aunt's ex at the hotel pool and a few days later we saw a couple of my dad’s mates sat on their balcony above a path we were walking along.

In Cairns Australia bumped into a guy I knew from uni.

In a Melbourne hostel a fellow blue from Reddish like me walked past as I was following a City game online.

In Vietnam bumped into a lad from
Manchester whom I'd met 2 years earlier in Oz.
 
Through work in the 90’s. I friended a fellow ex Navy and Falklands war vet. A good few years later. I met the lad who was his best man. Turns out he was the coxswain of the small ships boat that fished me out of the water, after my ship was lost.
 
Around 25 years ago I went raving in town and ended up at an after party in Bolton where I spent a couple of hours or so chatting to a lad I'd never met before.
The following week I started a new job in a factory. He also started that day. We ended up working on machines next to each other for the next 2 years and going raving together.

When we sailed to New York from Southampton a couple of years ago, we met a father and son on the ship who live down the road from us.
 
dronefromsector7G said:
Copied from the last small world thread:


Went to Majorca and my sister made friends with someone. A year later in a different resort we saw her walking down the street.

In Goa we saw my aunt's ex at the hotel pool and a few days later we saw a couple of my dad’s mates sat on their balcony above a path we were walking along.

In Cairns Australia bumped into a guy I knew from uni.

In a Melbourne hostel a fellow blue from Reddish like me walked past as I was following a City game online.

In Vietnam bumped into a lad from
Manchester whom I'd met 2 years earlier in Oz.
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A schoolmate and his wife went to visit his brother in Perth, Australia, for their honeymoon.

They went to watch his niece playing hockey, and a girl he knew from teacher training college was also watching the game.
 
A few years ago, I was in my early fifties, I was arranging a football trip for a veterans team I ran in Cheshire, to play another team in Ayr. We needed to make up our numbers, so one of our team invited his mate to join us - Mal Evans (not real name) from Manchester.

I got talking to Mal as we were driving up to Scotland. We chatted about school, and we both went to different schools in Manchester. He told me his brother was in the same year group as a band member of The Cult.

I started to piece things together, and I said to Mal, "It's a small world. I had two fights during my time at school. One was with Billy Duffy, and the other was with Craig Evans, your brother." He was gobsmacked by the coincidence.
 
I was walking down Catbells in the Lake District in 2020, during Covid, and I saw this lad walking up the hill. "Did you used to play for Cheadle Saints?" I asked. This would have been around 1981, and he was puzzled how I remembered him from 40 years ago.

He confirmed, and expressed bewilderment that I should have recognised him, 40 years later. I had to explain that I knew him as being the head of a prominent charity in Manchester, and my brother was one of his employees.
 
About 8 years ago my sons band were playing the Isle of Punk festival on Crammond island. It was a free event but you had to agree to carry some of the equipment over the causeway when the tide was out. Whilst we were waiting a lad came up to me and said "were you at Willington Parkside when we had the school riot ". I told him I was. "Well I am Raymond Morrison. I was the 1 who set the science lab on fire".
 
My first visit to Thailand and 1st day of holiday we were at one of the Temples when all of a sudden this goes
Hello Mr Taylor imagine meeting you here!
Was a wee guy who worked in the butchers near my parents house in Edinburgh.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
Was stood in the (huge) queue at Birmingham Airport on my way to Malaysia three years ago and someone from security opened a barrier up which I went through. Some seriously ripped bloke had a right go at me for pushing in, which I pushed back against, following which his girlfriend intervened and stood up for me and put him straight as she’d seen what had actually happened. After we’d all made up she clocked my sweatshirt which was for my maté’s business in Nottingham (which I was wearing for the flight because it was ridiculously comfortable) and over the course of the next ten minutes we realised that we must have about 50 friends in common in Nottingham, and she used to work in one of my other mate’s businesses for a few years, to the extent it was actually a bit weird that we’d never met before.

It’s not the most unlikely of coincidences on this thread, given the geographical proximity, but it was the totally random nature of the interaction and the fact I was wearing that sweatshirt that made me think about it so much on the flight afterwards.
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Talking about airports reminds me of a couple more stories.

Back in my accountancy days I was flying down to Heathrow to do some work for a client. Andy, one of the guys who'd started the same time as me had left the firm, and was in London awaiting transfer out to Africa. So I arranged to meet him in the evening. He mentioned that another friend of his, Hamid, who I knew, was flying in from Oman but he didn't know when, or how he'd get in touch with him.

Got down to Heathrow and was in one of the multiple long queues to buy a Tube ticket. When I got to the window I glanced to my right, and Hamid was at the front of the queue next to mine, so I told him when and where I was meeting Andy, and we all met up that evening.

A few years later I changed jobs to work for a big consultancy and they wanted me down in London for the first few weeks, so I flew down to Heathrow on my first day. On the plane, the guy I was sat next to looked a bit familiar, but I couldn't place him. Then he spoke to one of the cabin crew and he had a slight stutter. I then placed him as someone I worked with at BAE Systems a few years earlier. So we had a pleasant chat during the flight. On Friday evening I board my return flight, and I'm sat next to another former colleague. This happened the next two weeks, on both the outwards and return flights, where quite by chance I was sat next to someone I knew. I wrote to BA and they featured the story in the inflight magazine.
 
Another one from my travelling days. Had flown to Thailand half way through my year in Oz and met up in Bangkok with a guy I’d met in Oz. I was flying back to Oz the next day and he was flying back to England. I got to the Brunei airways departure lounge and he was sat waiting for the same connecting flight to Brunei.
 
About 20 years ago me and the missus were on a boat from Cape town over to robben island,got talking to another English couple taking the trip and turns out they lived around the corner from us in Northampton.
 
Vienna_70 said:
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.
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You didn't attempt to sit in their reserved seats and then swear at them when they told you the seats were theirs, did you?
 
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