CHAPTERS on Serendipity in the city 🌆

Chance encounters, fate and the magic of showing up

How many times have you said to someone, “we should go for a drink!” and actually ended up… going for a drink? For me, it is very few. Whereas my partner James, who suffers more with FOMO, will actually follow up and organise lunch with that nice couple we met once at a party. He would be genuinely disappointed if the plans were cancelled whereas I kind of love it when someone flakes. It’s especially delectable if you wanted to flake anyway then get to be the guy who says, “no worries at all, let’s get another date in soon!”.

I was at a friend’s wedding in the summer and as I was saying goodbye to the beautiful bride I met a woman called Hannah. We spoke briefly about both living in North London and she said, “I want to be your friend!” We made promises to meet up. In the taxi home James asked me, “are you actually going to though?” Obviously, I believed it had been a pie-crust promise fuelled by wine and replied, “maybe.”

However, unlike most of these non-committal agreements to hang out, we actually did. Granted it took five months to organise but, deciding not to flake, led me on an unforeseen adventure. After bonding over our love of dogs and putting the world to rights, Hannah generously invited me to a women’s writing group the following weekend.

The woman leading the group, Ruth, was dressed head to toe in black and as I entered the room she put on a pair of glasses she’d been holding in her right hand and stretched it out to shake mine asking, “who are you!?” She had a distinctive London twang and a tone of slight panic. I told her I was Hannah’s friend and she pointed to a list that my name wasn’t on, beckoning me to add it. I haven’t officially changed my name since getting married but in my head it has, so now I get stage fright when I’m asked it. I had to fill in a form at a salon the other day and I’m sure the woman thought I had amnesia when I hesitated for a few seconds too long over the box labelled “SURNAME:”

The meeting room was essentially a garage on a council estate but with windows where the door might once have been. While Ruth spent forty-five minutes trying to connect to Zoom and frantically putting on and taking off her glasses, my internal monologue berated myself for not flaking on this occasion. My increasingly numb bum was reaping the consequences on a hard plastic seat.

I got chatting to a woman from Hong Kong who explained that she’d escaped from the bad political situation and was finding it difficult to assimilate in London. She said quite seriously, “The pace is too slow here. I’m used to having everything on my doorstep.” She looked genuinely torn up about it all so my laugh at this observation felt inappropriate. “Sorry.” I said, “it’s just I’m usually complaining about the London pace being too fast.” To my relief she smiled but neither of us could think of anything to say so she started speaking to the woman behind me.

There was one man in the room which seemed off brand for a women’s writing group. He introduced himself as ‘an artist’ and was wearing a knitted hat with tassels coming out of both top corners. Whenever he spoke Ruth interrupted him to say, ‘yes, do speak up, you are allowed an opinion in this group, that’s why you’re here!” Or to make the point that “young men are getting a really bad rap in society at the moment and it is completely unfair!”

A young woman joined the group and sat down in the seat to my right. She was dressed immaculately in a gorgeous black belted mac, her skin was glowing clear and she wore bright pink lipstick. She introduced herself as “Lily” and announced that she was “part of the trans community”. This prompted Ruth to launch into another powerful speech about trans rights, reassuring the group that this was “a safe space.” I was shocked to realise in that moment that I’ve never met a trans woman before. My eyes diverted downwards, fixating on the floor while I processed that thought. Later, Lily told me that her and her housemate were writing a musical based on the London Tube map. “The circle line character is lost in life. The victoria and northern lines are two people who keep breaking up and getting back together. We’re struggling with a story for the central line.” I found her so admirable that I had to resist an overwhelming urge to hug her.

Hannah arrived. I immediately felt self-conscious that my new haircut was the same style as hers and that she might think I was a creep. To deflect, I made a joke that I was going to have blonde highlights put in so that I could look even more like her.

She was followed in by a woman in her fifties, who took the chair on my left side. The more I studied this woman I inexplicably warmed to her. I felt like we’d met before and when she spoke her voice registered to me ear as recognisable.

Our first task was to debate a writing theme and a young girl on the second row kicked off the discussion. “I’ve been thinking a lot about rebirth recently.” She went on to say something about reimagining female sex workers. I was so distracted by her outfit I zoned out. She was dressed in a black and white striped tutu skirt with frilly bloomers poking out at the back, two thick leather bra straps were protruding out of her frilly white top and she wore chunky platform, hob-nailed boots on her feet. It was sort of a beetlejuice meets dominatrix halloween costume but on a Sunday afternoon in the first week of February. Off the back of the theme of ‘rebirth’ the familiar woman to my left eloquently summarised how women are constantly having to reinvent themselves throughout their lives, especially ones who became a mother.

Ruth grabbed a marker pen and scribbled words on the whiteboard as everyone piled in ideas - rebirth, reinvention, empower, agenda. She paused until everyone had stopped speaking and turned to look at her. “I’m going to do something, watch!” She wrote “agenda” on the board but spelt it “a gender” and looked around the room for approval of her genius. Please, someone give Ruth her own sitcom.

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It was going dark outside and by some miracle the session had only overrun by ten minutes. The familiar woman turned towards me as it was finished. We spoke with the ease of two old friends. Maybe we had met in another life and relentlessly promised to “go for a drink” but never found the time. Within minutes of chatting we ascertained that we had both recently lost jobs in the media and gone freelance. We agreed that we would be able to learn from each other’s crafts and swapped numbers. As I put my phone back into my bag she asked, “are you from the North-West?” I replied yes and said “Are you?”

“Yes, I’m from Southport.” She said.

“No way! So am I!” I exclaimed. She told me she had started her career at one of the town’s two local newspapers. I had done my work experience at the rival one. How strange that our paths had now crossed on a Gospel Oak council estate.

As Hannah and I walked up to the main road she asked what I had thought of the group. Ordinarily, I would have spilled my unfiltered thoughts with little prompt - but I was lost for words. I felt baffled. Not by the smorgasbord of fascinating characters I had just encountered, so much as by this woman from my little known, northern, seaside town.

It’s not that it’s crazily unusual to bump into someone from home in London. People from Southport do leave. I’ve seen old flames on the tube before. I even spotted someone from school through my living room window in Hammersmith once and knocked on the glass pane to wave at them.

But what unknown science is behind coincidences like this? The amount of dots which need to join up for two people to be in the same place at the same time. And why, with some people, do we feel like it was meant to be.

I have often obsessed over the idea of fate since meeting James on a train. When we pieced together the lives we’d lived before our paths converged, we realised that we must have been within arms reach of each other for more than a decade. We had gone to school on the same road, moved to London at a similar time and been at the same gigs, in the same pubs, at the same exhibitions, before finally sitting side by side on a virgin pendolino.

Wouldn’t you love to see a map showing all the places you’ve been and all the times you’d crossed paths with people who later became part of your journey. I’d even pay to know where the paths I didn’t take would have led.

These thoughts are especially pertinent in times of change. When you’re considering your next moves and trying to navigate your way towards a dream future. I look enviously at those people who seem so sure of their direction. Do they just live along one straight line sloping upwards from left to right, like a positive gradient on a graph?

Maybe they are the central line character in Lily’s musical. They could sing a showstopper called “Choose Your Own Adventure” while wearing a red sequin jumpsuit with feathers around the cuffs. The circle line would retort with a ballad about the arrogance of mere mortals thinking they can predetermine the order of events. He passes through Edgware Road for the millionth time and prays that the signal will change.

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In the car I sat in traffic and tried calling my friends from Southport. No one picked up. I thought about leaving a voicemail on each missed call but lost my nerve every time. It seems so inconvenient to leave someone a voicemail and yet I will happily send a 5 minute voice-note on Whatsapp. I called James and, not one to miss out, he picked up. I told him about the group and about the coincidence of meeting someone from Southport. “I felt like I already knew her!” I said. “Isn’t it so weird when you just know you’re going to find a connection with a random person before you’ve even spoken to them.”

“That’s how I felt when I saw you.” He said.

I drove the rest of the way home thinking about life and fate and how lucky we are to be human. How refreshing it is to get out of your comfort zone, how much we can learn from talking to strangers and how glad I was I hadn’t flaked.

The next day I got a message from Hannah. “Just to let you know about highlights/balayage, I use the Toni & Guy Academy.” What a sweet message, I thought, I’m glad it wasn’t a voicemail.