Wyn Drabble: Fate or just pushing your luck

Quite recently, I was driving home listening to Wilco's Summerteeth on the car stereo. Coming towards me was a van with a company name, Hey Hoe, painted across its front. I only had a second or so to think it must be some sort of gardening operation and the very next lyrics in the Wilco song were "Hey Ho".
Whoa! Hey ho! I call that a coincidence! Then, the following day, a phone call came out of the blue. For his listening pleasure, the caller had been playing the recent Leonard Cohen DVD and for some reason (the depressing nature of the music?) he thought of me. Forty-odd years ago, we flatted together in various Christchurch houses but had neither seen nor heard from each other since. The depressing reminder was obviously depressing enough to prompt a Google and a call.
"Hello," said a voice I vaguely recognised but could not immediately identify. "This is John Stewart." (I have called him that for two reasons: first, that is his name and, second, I can't be bothered thinking up another one.)
And so the conversation went on in a rather predictable what-have-you-been-doing-for-the-last-40-years sort of way. He is currently living in Morrinsville, which he didn't expect me to have heard of.
"I drove through it a couple of weeks ago," I replied.
"Why?"
"I was lost."
Not much of a coincidence, you might say.
But then, about 20 minutes later, we decided to cut the communication short. Why?
I told him, a propos of nothing really, that we were travelling to Auckland on the coming weekend.
So was he. He and his partner were going to be staying at the Copthorne Harbourside Hotel.
"So are we," I replied.
"We're going to see Bob Dylan at Vector Arena." "So are we," I was able to reply.
That's why we cut the conversation short. We would have a far more interesting catch-up over a few beers at the hotel and then walking along to Vector together.
After 40 years, I call that a coincidence! But there's more to come which I will leave till later.
I don't fully know the difference between chance, coincidence, probability and synchronicity but some people take them all pretty seriously. However, I advise against trying to understand them all. Even Wikipedia comes up with the likes of: "Evidential probability, also called Bayesian probability (or subjectivist probability), can be assigned to any statement whatsoever, even when no random process is involved, as a way to represent its subjective plausibility, or the degree to which the statement is supported by the available evidence."
Stuff like that is best avoided. I like things to be somewhat simpler.
Here's a true story I like. It involves a new professor of statistics delivering his first lecture at the University of Warwick, England. He flipped a coin to demonstrate the 50-per cent probability of its landing either way but the coin landed on a polished floor, spun around a few times, and came to rest vertically on its edge. The class rose to their feet to applaud this feat. The odds have been calculated at a billion to one!
There is also a common statistical joke you've probably heard. A man packs a bomb in his luggage before heading to the airport. His reasoning was that the odds of there being two bombs on a flight were astronomically small so bringing one bomb should ensure a safe flight.
I like, even more, the lightness of the following quote from Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov: "A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence."
Which brings me neatly to the final part of the coincidence I was describing earlier.
When we arrived at Vector Arena, we found, to our surprise, that our seats and our friends' seats were not next to each other.
In the context of the earlier coincidences, I would call that a coincidence.
Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, public speaker and musician.