Coincidences

Do you believe in coincidence ?  I remember back in the day, when I was doing a bit of Anthropology at Uni, noticing that the difference between cultures where belief in magic is still prevalent and our own, is that in these "older", "earlier" cultures, for want of better words, everything has a cause. Your goat just died ? Someone bewitched it. Maybe it died of a well-known disease - but why did the disease infect my goat, and not my next-door neighbour's ? Because he's a witch ( although he thinks I offended the gods, or whatever.) That raven sitting on a signpost in front of you ?  Obviously a sacred bird telling you something, if only you could learn the secret language of ravens.

                                       
                                                 Answers on a postcard, please.

Now, I'm a sophisticated twenty-first century man-about-town, so when my goat dies, I just put it down to my bad luck.  And I know birds don't really fly around communicating with me, they're just doing their own birdy kind of stuff, and if they happen to do it on my head, well, it's just a coincidence. It's probably a good thing to take this point of view, on the whole : I've found that accusing your neighbours of witchcraft, and telling everyone that magpies are talking to you in their beautiful avine language, gets you off on the wrong foot with your Comunidad de Vecinos. 

"Bad luck" and "coincidence" aren't proper explanations, though : they're fall-back explanations, shorter than saying twenty times a day  "Hey, I don't have a clue what this is all about." . They don't explain anything. A coincidence is a combination of two elements, events, whatever, which look like they're connected, but they're not. Except they are : they're connected by the fact that we notice them, and, since human beings are story-telling animals, we start to weave a pattern out of them.

 Just recently, I came across the mother of all coincidences.

After the Summer from Hell 2 years ago, my sister and I spent a lot of 2012 going back to the house in Wales and clearing stuff out. One day I might develop the expressive resources to explain how strange, painful, and occasionally funny the business of packing our parents' lives into boxes and throwing most of it away was. But like a lot of stuff at the business end of death, it was a job which had to be done , and we did it, a week together at Easter, otherwise taking turns.

                                               A tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the stuff.

By September we'd got everything cleared out. Ailsa handled the last part of it, and I'm quite glad I never saw the house empty; so much of ourselves, of what we are, is actually there in the space we occupy, in our STUFF ( for want of a better word ) that I think it would have upset me to see thirty years of our life as a family reduced to memory, as if they had never happened.

Anyway, the house in Church Street went on the market, attracted bidders, we accepted an offer, endless farting-around with estate agents, lawyers ( whose activities make the secret language of ravens look reasonably intelligible ). and in April the contracts were exchanged.

We were cheered up considerably to find that the "unknown bidder" who'd been in the shadows while all the legal folks talked to each other, turned out to be Eleri, the daughter of Jane Edwards, our next-door neighbour. Ailsa and I had wanted to sell because we're too far away to really use the house, and it's a house that deserves to be lived in, so to sell to somebody local, who we knew, looking to start  a family close to her own family, was exactly what we would have wanted. Eleri had known my family since she was a child, had been to the funerals, and her Mum had been very kind to us, especially during my Dad's last illness and in keeping an eye on the house in the 18 months it had lain empty. So this was perfect, really.

Now for the strange part : when we cleared the house, the estate agent suggested leaving some carpets in place. Apparently it makes it easier for people viewing to imagine a comfortable, homely place, than just bare floorboards. So it was left to Eleri and her husband to clear the last of the carpets out and take them to the skip, and so they found the photograph.

Now, my Dad was a keen photographer, always taking an array of battered 1950s and 1960s cameras with him on walks, always on the look-out for a photo. This meant that when we cleared, Ailsa and I threw out thousands of photos : we kept a lot, but there's only so much you can keep. But one particular photo must have fallen out of somewhere more than 20 years ago, slipped down under the carpet in the spare room, unnoticed and forgotten. Which is where Eleri found it when she lifted the carpet.

It was a photograph of her, aged about 3 years old, taken round about 1986.

I don't really believe in coincidence, or in magic ( although if my Dad planned that one, it beats most card tricks I've seen ). Perhaps it's no more a message than the raven. But it is strange to think of that photograph, lying there forgotten more than 20 years in the dark as our family life moved noisily over and around it, the last 18 months in the empty house that didn't really belong to anyone, waiting for the moment to be found. And as a story-telling animal, I'm entitled to say that it feels like the old house welcoming the new family, telling them it's a good place to be and it's good for them to be in it.