You expect me to believe that?

Coincidence, for me, is best expressed by an ex-colleague going back to the churned up mess of a rugby field in the dark to search for a contact lens lost in the middle of the match; bending over at random and picking up the lost lens at once. I was there, it was true! It’s the sort of thing that you just couldn’t put in a novel because, no one, quite rightly, would believe you.

Is that on a par with my experience of visiting the childhood home of the Danish composer Carl Nielsen on the remote island of Fyn, signing my name in the visitors’ book, flicking back a few pages and finding the name of a colleague I’d taught with two years previously?

Or perhaps losing my wallet in Upper Saint Martins Lane in Central London, continuing blithely on my way to Brixton where I was staying unconscious of my loss and, when I made it back, getting to the door just as Clarrie was concluding a telephone conversation with the man who had found my wallet; found my address in Cardiff; phoned my home; given my mother a huge shock (a stranger asking if I lived there? Obviously I was dead); got the phone number of where I was staying; phoned Clarrie to tell me not to worry, the wallet was safe and awaiting collection. Where was the coincidence? Why, in having the only honest man in Central London finding the bloody thing!

Coincidences, extraordinary coincidences, happen with such regularity that perhaps they ought to be considered normality, and the so-called mundane treated as exceptional. Imagine a world without coincidences; what a boring place it would be. If it wasn’t for Newton sitting beneath an apple tree ready to disgorge its fruit we would never have discovered gravity and we would all now be drifting aimlessly though space. Gosh aren’t we lucky?

All this came to mind as I was eating my lunch of baked partridge.

I would like to let that sentence stand by itself as I quite like the kudos or ethos that it seems to exude. But, perhaps I should explain that foul is not my usual repast and this bird was the fruit (so to speak) of my undignified scavenging of the ‘reduced’ section in Tesco. However, apart from being a little resilient to the teeth, it was more than acceptable. The coincidence aspect of my meal was one of those serendipitous occasions when the senses of sight, taste, touch, hearing and smell are all bought together in a completion which is judiciously apt: as I brought out the partridge from the oven, Radio 4’s food programme started to talk about pear trees - it’s the sort of thing that happens in badly produced TV shows when one character turns to another says something about the current situation and then turns on the radio for a seamless disembodied commentary on exactly that topic!

This is not the first time that this has happened. A while back on the way to work when I was telling Toni about the trauma which used to attend each departure from university during the vacations when all my belongings had to be packed, and my room in Hall left empty for the Conference People to use; the only way I kept my sanity during the packing process was to listen to a recording I had of insanely ‘happy’ music which dulled the horrific tedium of trying to get my possessions (even then) into some sort of portable mass.

André Ernest Modeste Grétry (an eighteenth century Belgian composer, usually linked with Gluck in compilation CDs) was the writer of the ballet music I used to listen to at these trying moments. I was just saying to Toni that I had found the actual cassette of the music I used in University which would come in handy for the upheaval of Pickford’s taking our stuff into storage, when, as if on cue, the familiar strains of Grétry’s music emanated from the Radio 3 programme that neither of us was really attending to! Now that is a significant coincidence in my view; though it would have been an even greater one if we had been listening to Radio1!

What a lazy Sunday this has been. Though, thinking about it, not quite as lazy as I thought. The adjustment of my watch last night meant that though I thought that I was getting up at a much laid back midday; because of my faulty adjustment I actually got up at a much more respectable 10 am. You see, even when I try and live a life of total indulgence, circumstances intervene to show me the right path!

I sometimes wish my guardian angel was a little more louche.