Beyond Coincidence Read Free

pulled off the road for lunch. Suddenly Martin began talking about the design of a car he had seen. This was unusual because, uniquely among men, Martin is not interested in cars. Normally he can’t differentiate one model from another; he can barely remember the make of his own. This time he’d been so struck by the car he’d made a mental note of the make. It was an Audi.
    â€œAnd if you could afford to buy one of those cars,” said Brian, “would you like to own one?”
    â€œWell, yes,” said Martin, considering a novel idea. “I think I would.”
    â€œThen I know just the place you should go,” said Brian, and he pointed through the window behind Martin’s back. Across the road was a car showroom called Martin’s Audis.
    Early on in the research process Martin read Arthur Koestler’s famous 1972 book, The Roots of Coincidence. First he poured himself a hot bath. It happened that at that time he was sorting out old vinyl records that he hadn’t played for years. He’d been systematically playing these records to see if they were worth keeping or not. At the point when he settled into the bath with Mr. Koestler, Mickey Jupp, a little-known artist from England, started singing in the background.
    There was Martin, out of his depth in scientific experiments into paranormal phenomena, specifically to test whether there is such a thing as telepathy. Early research was carried out in Russia by a scientist called Bechterer, who, afraid the authorities might consider his work too frivolous, disguised the telepathy part by calling it “biological radio.” No sooner had Martin read that phrase than in the other room Mickey Jupp sang the words “nature’s radio.” It was a song about telepathy between lovers: “You won’t have to tell me, because I’ll already know / I’ll have heard the news on Nature’s Radio.”
    Now, if Martin were an Ancient Greek he would have regarded this as a good omen. Actually he did anyway. It feels good when two pieces of like phenomena shake hands in your bathroom, particularly when they have judged your mood so well.
    Later Martin and Brian were conducting random street interviews. The sixth person stopped turned out to have devoted his life to the celebration and recording of coincidence. By this time it did not seem odd at all. Coincidences? We could call them up at will! Perhaps what we should have been doing was concentrating our powers on winning the lottery.
    So far so benign. We’ve tended to think of coincidences as having good intentions, though as neither random events nor the actions of gods (depending on your standpoint) are necessarily friendly, there’s no reason why they should be so restricted. Of course, unhappy coincidences happen all the time.
    If a woman were to urinate in your suitcase because it resembled her unfaithful husband’s (you snigger, but it has happened), you would feel as though you were trapped in a real-life Larry David routine.
    If all the passengers on a 747 jumbo jet happened to pack a small anvil in their hand luggage, the effect wouldn’t be beneficial to any of them and they probably wouldn’t be able to tell the story either, though the rest of us would be fascinated to read about it in a newspaper, or a novel, or watch it take place in a film. The pattern of coincidence engages us, even when it involves hardship or tragedy, and even victims of bad coincidence may experience a compensating sense of being included or chosen. Sometimes it is better to be noticed, even if we suffer by it, than to be ignored.
    We have included lucky stories and unlucky stories in this book, funny stories, sad stories, violent stories, and romantic stories. We love coincidence so much that a misguided assumption prevails, that if a story contains one then it is, by definition, interesting. Many coincidence books have been written with that lazy principle in