How bizarre.

You know those times in your life where coincidences or peculiar things happen one after the other in quick succession? Well it just happened to me. The last 24 hours has been a little peculiar.

1. I just finished writing a short story for a magazine competition and was about to post it when a man passed me holding a passport. Oh my god. I suddenly realised I'd forgotten to attach a passport photo to my entry! Thank you strange man I thought but then I remembered, the only photo booth I knew about was in the post office and it was about to close. I got there 5 minutes before closing and went inside only to discover a man already inside the booth. He was behind the curtain, just his bottom and legs on show, screaming into his mobile phone (I presume he was on a phone rather than just screaming at the machine) saying the bloody booth had swallowed his money and now it wasn't working. Not a good start! I was racking my brain what to do next as I wandered into sainsburys to get some milk. As I went in I stopped to think but couldn't concentrate because all this banging was going on in the corner, with builders everywhere, hammering and shouting. I glared in their general direction and then through the haze of dust, an appirition... Could it be? a photo booth? Oh my God. It was half covered with a dust sheet while they worked around it. Amazingly it was still plugged in and working so after a bit of a wheeze (allergic to dust) I got my photos. The embarrassing thing was that the photos were truly hideous, quite terrifying in fact. I had come out with my hair scraped back and not a scrap of makeup on, so if I do win the competition, there will be a photo of me looking like an axe murderer, prominently displayed in a very fashionable magazine!


2. I was at my writing class last night and we were all given this paragraph to study, to analyse the style, grammar etc. The extract was about a man finding a box in his attic containing a bundle of letters his wife had written. They were to an old flame of hers but she had never posted a single one. Oh my God I thought. I was then asked to read out my homework. As I read it aloud, everyone just looked at me with complete surprise, mouths open.  My story was about a girl going into the attic and finding a bundle of love letters written by her mother but that she had never sent! How weird is that?


3. I just went into Starbucks to get a latte. Starbucks have this annoying new habit of asking for your name. They scream it out across the cafe when your coffee is ready and it really irritates me so I always give them a fake name. I usually come up with something quite whimsical like Pixie or Summer but today I went blank and said 'Jane'. Very imaginative I know. The guy asked me to repeat it and I loudly said 'JANE' and he scribbled it on the side of the cup. A few minutes later, a different Starbucks person screams out 'Julie'? I look around but there is no one behind me so I just stand there. She looks at me, then at the scribbled writing again and shouts out 'Julie'... 'Juliet'? I swear to God I just gawped. I said slowly, 'is it for Jane, a tall skinny latte?' And she looks at the cup again and says, 'oh yes, sorry Jane'.  What the....?

Comments

Gary Broadbent said…
You should reread that book from the 90s, 'Serendipity' I think it was called? You know, the one about coincidences having meaning.

Big congrats on winning the short story prize...when's the prize night?

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