There’s no such thing as a co-incidence

Let me tell you a story. A story of co-incidences. 

When I was sixteen, I worked for two months in a hotel in Scotland. It was in a little village on the side of a loch. There I met my first love. It was very hard to leave him and return to my parents and siblings. Not long after that we came back to New Zealand.  

Fast forward forty years, and my husband and I were planning a trip to the UK. On the off chance I wrote a letter to my old love, which eventually reached him. He was married and living in the same village. So we visited and had a lovely time. My husband was disappointed that we hadn’t been able to go to a whiskey distillery but my old love said his son worked at one and we could visit it. It was Springbank at Campeltown. Turned out to be the best place we could have gone. Campbeltown was also where Paul McCartney had lived. Hubby is a huge fan of the Beatles. ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and ‘Mull of Kintyre’ are songs about the area.

When we got home to NZ, hubby had to go to the dentist. He was recounting our trip and the assistant asked ‘Which village?’ Turned out she had been born and brought up there, and went to school with my old love's children. It doesn’t stop there. A very short while later, hubby was in the city for a very random reason and parked outside a whiskey shop. Put his head in and asked ‘do you have any Springbank?’ Yes, he did and it was his best seller. And the owner knew my old love’s son.

Now fast forward another ten years. We were visiting a friend’s son’s wife’s sister in the depths of the Catlins in the South Island. We’d never been there before. The sister and her husband also had his parents visiting. Talk turned to whiskey, especially as there was a collection of whiskey bottles in the dining room. Yes, they had Springbank. We said we’d been to the distillery in Campbeltown, and told them the village we’d stayed at. The parents asked ‘Who did you stay with?’ They are the best friends of my old love and his wife!

Is there a story in there? You betcha’.