Ever Experienced a Bizarre Coincidence?

You may have wondered if it was fate, a message from the universe or just an odd occurrence.

Some people believe there’s no such thing as coincidence, that everything happens for a reason. I haven’t made my mind up about that yet, but there are some mysterious occurrences in life that are fiendishly difficult to explain.

What follows is the story of an unexpected meeting I had while travelling and an extraordinary coincidence a few years down the road.

There were 30 students in my class at Loughborough University, England, including my friend Neville Taylor. Neville had a great sense of humour, and we often shared a laugh in lectures and biology labs.

After graduation in June 1988, I said farewell to Neville and my other friends and headed home to Brighton for the summer.

I wanted to travel before settling down into a regular job, so I started making plans to spend a year backpacking around Australia. After enduring six months of hellish work in a vacuum pump factory, I was finally able to quit with enough money for my plane ticket.

My sister Jackie was also ready for a travel adventure, so we planned to fly out to Australia together and then go our separate ways.

We landed in Sydney with our GIANT backpacks and travelled by bus up the east coast of Australia to Cairns. We found a place to live and worked in a motel for a couple of months to save some travel money.

My husband-to-be, Warren, flew out to meet me after graduating from university, and we travelled together for the rest of the year.

In Cairns, we enjoyed scuba diving in the crystal clear waters of the Great Barrier Reef and white water rafting on the Tully River. After three months working in Cairns, we headed off to the centre of Australia to see Ayers rock.

We drove 2000km across the Simpson desert in a battered old car with no A/C. The desert heat was intense — close to 50 degrees some days, and we’d drive for what seemed like hours before passing another vehicle.

After climbing Ayers Rock, we made our way north to Darwin. We canoed in the crocodile-infested waters of Katherine Gorge, and the extreme heat forced us to sleep on the ground outside our tent.

Early each morning we were rudely awoken by the BOOM BOOM BOOM of kangaroos bounding across the campground and emus pecking in the grass nearby.

From Darwin, we travelled by bus around the North West coast, and at a place called Monkey Mia, I had the beautiful experience of wading in the ocean with wild dolphins swimming all around me.

By the time we arrived in Perth, we were down to our last few dollars and couldn’t even afford to stay in a backpacker’s hostel. Luckily, we heard of a cheap room for rent in a house nearby, and so for $30.00 a week, we had a roof over our heads — but barely.

The place was a ramshackle old dump. There were slugs in the shower, cockroaches running freely through the kitchen cabinets and a small grey mouse behind the fridge, which I did become rather fond of in the end.

We quickly found jobs and worked in Perth for the next five months. We could’ve moved out and found better accommodation, but we enjoyed the company of our five roommates. Eventually, we got used to the other wildlife in the house as well!

I’ll always enjoy the memory of us all celebrating Christmas on the beach with a cardboard cut-out Christmas tree and fruit salad lunch.

A condition of staying in the house was that we had to find someone else to rent our room when we left. Towards the end of our year in Australia, we posted Room for Rent flyers on noticeboards in local backpacker hostels and started preparing to leave.

One day the doorbell rang, and who should I find on the doorstep with our flyer in his hand but my old university friend, Neville Taylor!

Neville and I hadn’t had any contact since we left university, so it was a bit of a shock to find him standing there on the doorstep. We stared at each other in amazement for a few seconds and then burst out laughing. Out came the beer, and we had a great evening catching up.

What do you think? Are these occurrences random, or is the cheeky universe having a laugh?

Fast forward three years

Warren and I were back in England, living and working in London. One morning, we were taking the train into central London for the day. Warren was wearing a shirt one of our friends had given him in Perth. The shirt reminded me of our time in Australia, and we started reminiscing.

I said, “Hey, remember that crazy day when Neville Taylor showed up on the doorstep? Wasn’t that incredible?!!”

Before Warren could answer, we heard a loud chuckle from across the train carriage. A familiar voice said, “Yes, Gill, that was a pretty amazing coincidence, wasn’t it?”

We looked over, and a cheeky grinning face popped up over the top of the seat. I expect you can guess who it was.

Yep, my old friend Neville Taylor. What are the chances?

If you’ve had an extraordinary coincidence, please share it in the comments or better still, write a story and tag me so I can read it. :)

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