As a young child and teenager I was a voracious reader. No internet or mobile telephone doom scrolling in those days. My mother used to buy me ‘Puffin’ books and I read them at night under the covers with a torch. One of the many poignant things about dealing with my parent’s house after their death was the row upon row of Puffin books they’d kept, each one with my name written on the flyleaf and dated by my mother. Complete sets of Swallows and Amazons and Doctor Dolittle, the Weirdstone of Brisingamen, to name but a few. I couldn’t save them all as my cottage is small, but I did keep a few of the most memorable.

Later books she bought me were more serious. Ted Hughes’s ‘Hawk in the Rain’, which I still have and regularly dip into. Another was a book by Arthur Koestler, the title which I can’t remember now, and which I couldn’t find in the house, but I do remember one bit of it where he says that life is a series of coincidences like waves. What stuck in my memory from the analogy was that we don’t notice the troughs when not much happens, we only notice the peaks when the strangest events, places or people coincide. What appears to be remarkable and unlikely is in fact, according to Koestler, just the cycle of coincidence waves passing by.

Impossible to actually discern any causality or quantification, but interesting to ponder on and I wonder what set of personal coincidences led Koestler to the conclusion. I’ve had a few recently, so I must be in the peak of a wave. I discovered that the place where I’m going on holiday in the Outer Hebrides is where the Swallows and Amazon’s author Arthur Ransome stayed when he overcame writer’s block to write the book ‘Great Northern’. At the same time as I found this out, I happened to be reading Great Northern from the set I collected from my parent’s house. In a people coincidence, the daughter of my friend from London was at the wedding of a friend of hers, and two people from the village where I live on the moors were at the same wedding.

In themselves neither of these is particularly unusual, but they did make me become a bit more alert. My metaphorical ears pricked up and I looked around wondering what was next. There was no real consequence attached to either of these quirks, but sometimes a set of uncanny coincidences can lead to dramatic life changes. Which, I suppose, is why Arthur Koestler was writing about them, and why chance and coincidence has attracted the attention of philosophers throughout the ages. Horace Walpole said “What is called chance is the instrument of Providence” and the poet Théophile Gautier observed “Le hasard, c’est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu, quand il ne veut pas signer” (TG can translate!). We expect life to be random and unconnected, which it is in the trough of the wave, so when pattern emerges from the spinning of fates, we take notice.

Have you ever experienced a set of noteworthy coincidences?

Rowan on the Moor

A Moodscope member