My tour of the UK continues (I am in Canterbury,
Aldershot, Swindon and Milton Keynes this week –oh, the glamour). I was
recently in Norwich, a city that I love and regularly visit. Back in the 1990s
I ate some Golden Graham cereal covered in Colman’s mustard for the delight of
the East Anglian crowd. The mustard factory is in the city and I will do
anything for local approval.
I thought I knew the place well enough to walk from my
Bed and Breakfast to the shopping centre. But I took a wrong turn and am pretty
sure I passed through a Goodnight Sweetheart style passage back to the 1960.. I walked around
a place called Anglia Square which would certainly have been knocked down and
redeveloped if I was in the 21st Century.
My useless iphone battery had died after ten minutes
of use and so I had to rely on the incorrect map in my head to get back to the
(relative) future. I got quite badly
lost. And as I am a man I have evolved to be incapable of asking for directions.
After an hour of wandering I was just wondering if I
might bump into my friend and local celebrity Adam Buxton (from Adam and Joe, 6
Music and a new podcast that you should check out). But what were the chances
of that?
Seconds later I had to stop as a car was pulling out
of the parking space in front of a framing shop. An approaching mud-strewn 4 by 4 took
advantage of the gap and turned off the road. The driver waved, I thought to
acknowledge that he might be accused of cutting me up. But I looked again and
saw the kind, bearded face of the man I had just been thinking about. I had
conjured a minor celebrity up out of thin air.
You probably only get three wishes granted in a life
time and I had wasted one of mine apparating a man who I had last seen a couple
of weeks ago. I could have wished for Gemma Chan. But no. I got Buxton.
It was a strange coincidence, both that I had been
thinking of him and that I had accidentally found myself in this rather obscure
part of Norwich. We briefly chatted and Adam confirmed that I was now back on
track for the city centre. It was like he was a guardian angel sent to point me
in the right direction. I’d have preferred the angel Adam Buxton to have turned
up an hour before and made me turn the
right way out of my B&B or given me
the Euromillions numbers, but you can’t have it all.
It feels freaky when something like this happens, but
of course even if a happenstance is a million to one then it will still occur
once every million times. You will end up unexpectedly meeting someone you were
just thinking about every now and again. It would only be significant if it
happened every time you thought of a person or indeed if it never happened. The
fact that coincidences happen, in actual fact, proves that everything it
random. A better proof of a guiding hand would be if coincidences never occurred.
Because some supernatural being would have to work their socks off
orchestrating that nightmare.
So if you look up right now to see me smiling down at
you, you’re going to freak out. But it doesn’t mean a thing!
But if I then give you tonight’s correct lottery
numbers then forget everything I said.
I had a bug last week, but I am a trooper and have only ever missed one gig due to illness so my shows went on. On stage in Wolverhampton I was sick in my mouth (a common reaction to being in Wolverhampton), but I followed the old showbiz maxim (that I’ve made up), “Swallow it and carry on”. Great advice for all performers in a variety of situations.
