“Small World” Stories

I’ll come back and add the details later, but for the time being I wanted a place to remind myself of all the great “small world”/”seven degrees of separation” stories and random coincidences I’ve had over the years:

• Randomly bumped into Jim Bellett outside a hostel in Canmore in the middle of winter, years after we had first me at Gallipoli and on a yacht in Turkey in 1999.
• Joining the dots between Simon Crease and Sarah “Malaria” Treadwell at Pickwicks Pub in Baden when Simon first started work at ALSTOM.
• Giving a tour of the Haas School of Business to Letitia Midmore, who I used to know when we lived in Baden, Switzerland 4-5 years previously, but had lost touch with each other.
• Being assigned to the same beginner Spanish class in Buenos Aires with Louise Phillips, who I’d met a couple of years previously in Melbourne through a mutual friend Ros Beadle.
• A commenter on this blog turned out to be an Aussie we met at the hotel bar in Pyongyang, North Korea.
• Will Johnson sitting on my jacket in a NYC West Village bar at 3am in the morning, when he was meant to be in the UK and I was meant to be in SF.
• Walking into a random pub in central London for a pint on a winter’s day to find my mate Ian Summerside (English, but living in Florida at the time) dressed and ready to be best man at a friend’s wedding in the Tower of London.
• Recognizing Alexa Freese amongst the crowd at the SF Oktoberfest in Fort Mason, years after we’d first met in Zurich.
• Spotting my old army mate Mick Russo in the Air New Zealand lounge at Melbourne airport some 15 years after we last saw each other.
• Being paired to climb the Matterhorn with the same mountain guide I climbed in the Alps with some 8 years earlier.