A conversation with a colleague of mine this morning reminded me how small the world really is. Her friend's theory is that it contains merely 1500 people, who we meet over and over again, and I have a feeling that might be right. Let me explain...
The latest, and by no means the strangest, example of all of this is a project student I'm supervising, Matt. Matt has a boyfriend, Drew. Drew is a psychologist, postgrad. Jen is working with some psychologists on packaging design. Who's she working with? Yup, you guessed it, Drew.
This is only the latest in a long line of strangeness. Take, for instance, the house I moved into a few years ago. It was Becky's place. I'd never met Becky before, I just responded to a house-mate needed notice and went round. Turns out Becky is a Bible Studies student who's on a course with a friend of Jen's. But that's minor in terms of the coincidences that were to come. Another girl, Claire, also lived in the house. Her boyfriend, Mike, had been living, amongst other people, with a guy called Jim ever since they'd come to uni and become friends. Jim, it turns out, was the same Jim I was quite good friends with when I did my undergradute. Oh, but if you think that's the weirdest, there's stranger to come. After moving out of Becky's place, I started a postgradute MSc in nanotechnolgy. I met a guy by the name of Rob, and, albeit only until he went certifiably mad, we were mates. So, I got chatting to Rob one day, and he asked whereabouts in Sheffield I'd lived. Well, it turns out he knew the area where I'd lived when I was living with Becky. Knew the house, even. In fact, it turns out that he knew Becky even better than I did... The world is too small.
My relationships are a minefield, too. Met a girl, Helen, at a university end-of-year thing. We had a very brief fling, and I didn't call her back. My mistake. Turns out that her brother, John, had been living with my brother in a shared house for a number of years, and they were still good friends. It's not far off a bizarre form of incest.
Of course, it would be lax of me to ignore the strangeness that was discovering, upon reaching university for the first time, that one of the guys who lived three doors down from me was friends at school with one of my dad's cousin's daughters, a girl by the name of Holly. This, of course, was a realisation facilitated by the fact that one of my dad's other cousins, this guy's brother, is moderately famous for presenting horse racing programs.
All this is a little strange, don't you think? All the people in the world to meet, and yet we only ever meet friends, siblings and (ex)lovers of people we already know. There's some kind of conspiracy here, and I'm determined to get to the root of it. Ok, not actually determined, more interested. Well, let's be honest here, not entirely interested. It's just weird, 'k?