Coincidences by the cupful
LONG ago, I found myself travelling in a firstclass compartment from Waterloo to Alton, Hampshire. I rarely travel first class. It was one of those sixseat compartments you’d try to keep to yourself, by looking ill or difficult, but, as it happened, it was occupied only by me and the middle-aged man who sat opposite. We soon got talking and, before Woking, I learned that my companion had come up with an invention that was well on the way to making him rich.
‘Our trip passed merrily, two fully-fledged tea bores chatting about “the cup that cheers”
Nowadays, invention mostly happens out of sight, in the tech world—a new app, a longerlasting battery—but back then you really had to invent a tangible new thing. My new friend’s idea came to him in the office kitchen. He wasn’t an inventor professionally—i think he might have been an accountant or a banker—and it came to him out of the blue as he poured boiling water over a teabag.
Like a lot of people who make tea alone and think themselves unobserved, he had got into the habit of using one teaspoon to retrieve the teabag and another to squeeze the last of the liquor from the leaves. The kitchen sink was full of teaspoons waiting to be washed up and that was when he had his eureka moment.
After weeks of trial and error, he came up with the solution: the Self Squeezing Teabag. You picked it out on the end of a thread, pulled some strings and hey presto! He had sold the patent— or maybe he took a royalty—to Tetley and was going about everywhere in first class.
By coincidence, I had published my first book, about a journey to the tea country of India and China, so our trip passed merrily, two fully-fledged tea bores chatting about ‘the cup that cheers’.
Later, he wrote to me, sharing his conviction that the world consisted of only 5,000 people, all the others being wraiths or illusions. As a response to the mystery of coincidence, I thought this was an ingenious theory, although I can never decide whether to accept it or not.
I suppose it must come down to predisposition, the way our minds work: after all, on equal evidence, some people will believe in ghosts and some don’t. The same must hold true for whether you back or revile Brexit or become radical or nostalgic.
I suspect most people adopt positions that reflect their nature, and that their nature is set before birth, which I deduce from the fact that in all important respects my own children seem just the same now as when they were born. So it is that some people pooh-pooh coincidence and others are drawn to it.
A relation once started a Coincidence Diary, but in less than a week he gave up in fright. He suspected that dwelling on coincidences had begun to make them occur around him and he worried where it might all lead.
I’ve been thinking about this again because of Martin Parr. He is a celebrated documentary photographer although, admittedly, I had never heard of him until asked to interview him at the Port Eliot Festival this summer.
He recently published a set of photographs of food from around the world, all lurid and mostly revolting: phallic sausages on plastic plates, a sad iced bun, rows of gelatinous Japanese sweets. The book was called Real Food, a counterblast to the proliferation of Sunday supplement food photography—perfect pancetta, dripping roasts and unachievably glamorous spreads.
He talked about his early work documenting the lives of Methodist farmers around Hebden Bridge, about Ascot and holidaymakers at New Brighton. We discussed his most recent project, a commission from Oxford University (Book reviews, September 27).
Here was a tribe of the sort he enjoyed photographing: an academic tribe, with gowns, high tables, bicycles and arcane traditions. The blurb describes ‘the behind-the-scenes student antics and rituals that for many outside these elite establishments will remain a secret’.
COUNTRY LIFE’S Books Editor sent me a scan of a photo from it that has amazed us all. It shows a sort of dejeuner sur l’herbe, with a family under a tree and dogs on leads, illustrating what Oxford antic or ritual I don’t know, only that the family in question, by weird coincidence, is mine. What are the chances of that? ‘Martin Parr: Oxford’ is at Weston Library, Oxford, until October 22