
With me, when I speak of coincidence, it’s in the realm of my daily diet of written and video content. My previous AMAZING COINCIDENCE was in the crossover between a Whatsapp video and a Youtube video.
This coincidence is slightly more complex. In fact, it was a double coincidence. Two overlaps from one source all in the space of about four days. The time frame is important I think, as that’s what makes coincidences stand out. If these quirky little ‘bookmarks’ happened with plenty of time in between, we wouldn’t notice them. I’m sure there is some mathematical expression of coincidence out there, but for now, I want to get to my story!
I have just finished reading a book by Julian Barnes called ‘The Sense of an Ending’, a truly unique and wonderful book. Funnily, taking the book out from the library was an accident. I thought Julian Barnes was the guy who wrote ‘The Magus’ and ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’. It was John Fowles who wrote those. One of the themes of the book is history and how it gets recorded and later still, how it is perceived (and misperceived). Well, I got the authors bit of history wrong but I’m really glad I did. Finding books you apparently need to read at exactly the right time is a ‘quirky’ topic for another post.
Back to the coincidence/s – from this same source. The narrator of the story, Anthony Webster, describes at one point how his love-interest’s mom roasts a chicken. Veronica’s mom has this thing she does when preparing it, which in all my years of cooking, I have never ever heard of …
Actually, I’m lying. I HAVE heard of it, for the FIRST TIME EVER about a day before reading that passage. It was on Nate, the foul-mouthed, Black Metal, Australian chef’s cooking channel (the Great Youtube Crossover – you see?!) The episode was on ‘How to Roast a Chook’ where the studded Nate shows us just how.
So Nate, in Australia (2021) and Veronica’s mom in Kent(70’s) – take their chickens, get hold of the upper layer of skin and without tearing it, separate it from the flesh and shove garlic and herbs into the little ‘pockets’ that kind of form there if done carefully. Not really my thing but hey – there was coincidence number one!
So to coincidence number two … Youtube is kind of involved here but not completely. I have a Youtube channel for viewing things of interest – music for instance. Over time I’ve created a music playlist of songs that just somehow pop into in my head. When he saw what I was doing (I’d shared it to Facebook), a friend of mines’ husband told me that he was doing something similar. He was making a playlist of all the bands he would pay to see/have seen! The criteria for his playlist- 100 artists, one song per band. He based it on LP’s he’s had over the years. Quite a journey he reckoned. One of the bands he selected was The Moody Blues …
I have not thought of The Moody Blues in decades. I would say about four days after our Facebook Messenger discussion, Anthony Webster, our hero from the Julian Barnes book, finds himself – still in the 70’s – listening and dancing to The Moody Blues from his collection of LP’s. That reminds me. I must go and give them a listen!