Invisible Coincidences

I have a little theory about coincidences. It’s simple really. Occasionally*, you bump into an old friend at, let’s say, an airport. When this happens to me, I am astonished. I tell my acquaintance that I am astonished. He tells me that he is astonished. We agree that this is astonishing, and that we must, immediately, have a beer and discuss how surprised we are.

But an airport contains thousands of people, at least the London ones do (and this post makes no claims about remote airstrips in the Malayan jungle). And you only look at the faces of maybe a few tens of people, perhaps hundreds. So for every time that you actually see an old friend at an airport, it stands to reason that there must be tens, if not hundreds of times that you were in the same airport as an old chum, but neither of you saw each other. 230,000 people pass through Heathrow every day.

In the eyes of God, as it were, coincidences are happening all the time. I was strolling down Oxford Street yesterday. As far as I was concerned, no coincidences occurred at all. But God, gazing down upon me from his heavenly throne, knew that my friend from primary school was walking on the other side, that the lady on the corner used to go out with my godfather, and that my fiancée’s cousin’s chiropractor was looking out at me from the upstairs window of Primark.

In the eyes of God, there are far more coincidences than we will ever see.

I was thinking about all this because of the Beatles. There are several extraordinary-seeming coincidences involving Beatles songs. For example, Paul McCartney read a short article in the Daily Mail about a runaway teenage girl and was inspired to write She’s Leaving Home.

The girl in the article was called Melanie Coe, and Paul McCartney was entirely unaware that he had actually met her, three years previously.

She had appeared as a contestant on a TV show called Ready, Steady, Go! The Beatles had been on the same programme performing She Loves You, and she had chatted to them.

Melanie was competing in a lip-syncing contest. Paul was the judge, and he chose her as winner. You can watch the moment, if you like, it’s about ten minutes and forty seconds in.

And then, three years later, he wrote a song about her, without knowing that he was doing it.

The thing is that he would have remained unaware were it not that the eyes, not of God, but of thousands of enthusiasts are on the Beatles. There are scholars and geeks and nerds and historians who track down every detail of every Beatles song. No other band attracts nearly as much attention. Paul said in an interview that he had read an article in the Daily Mail, so people went to the archives and searched that article out. Then they searched out the girl. Then they interviewed her, and they’re still interviewing her many years later.

If She’s Leaving Home had been written by Fleetwood Mac none of that would have happened.

The same goes for Eleanor Rigby. Paul McCartney had an idea for a song about a lonely old lady called Miss Daisy Hawkins. However, he was not happy with the name. There was an actress in the film Help! called Eleanor Bron, and he thought that that would be a good first name. So he changed the words, and now the song was about Eleanor Hawkins.

Then, one night in Bristol, he happened to pass a wine merchant’s called Rigby & Evens Ltd, and he decided that Rigby was much better than Hawkins.

And thus did we get the song Eleanor Rigby.

The odd thing is that Paul McCartney and John Lennon had first met in a churchyard in Liverpool; and that churchyard contains the grave of a woman called Eleanor Rigby.

I do not consider this an extraordinary coincidence.

All that is extraordinary is the level of scrutiny that Lennon, McCartney and their songs have come under. Nobody gives this amount of attention to The Kinks. Nobody tracks down the place where Rodgers first met Hammerstein and then searches the building for possible links to their songs.

The Beatles are simply studied so much that the coincidences are revealed.

I confidently believe that if your life, dear reader, were studied with the intensity given to the Beatles, all sorts of extraordinary coincidences would be revealed. You would find that you had met your spouse many years before you thought you did, in some forgotten playground. You would have seen a baby born in the same bed as you, and strolled blithely past a grave with your name on it.

And the strangest thing is that neither you nor I will ever know of all those coincidences. They will remain forever invisible, and we shall remain surprised when we bump into an old friend at the airport. And we shall go and have a beer and discuss how extraordinary it is, and how we would never have believed it could be true, while another friend hurries past, unseen, to his departure gate, and God chuckles about everything that we have missed.

* When I was seven years old, I was in Mrs Lemoine’s Class. There was a weekly spelling test, and at the end of term, Mrs Lemoine gave a special prize to anybody who had got full marks in every single one. I had full marks until the very last test of the term, when I misspelt ‘occassionally’. I put two Ss instead of one.

I can’t even remember what the prize was, I only remember my disappointment.

I just did it again.

Bless you, autocorrect.