London is a big place and a lot of people live here. At least a thousand I'd say. Maybe more. The chances of you bumping into someone you know accidentally are small. In fact there are loads of people I know, who live in this town and who I have never crossed paths with by chance. But there are others that you coincidentally run into so much that you begin to suspect they might be following you.
Last Monday I was on the tube on the way to the Leicester Square Theatre and then the diminutive, PG Tips chimp-faced comedian Matthew Crosby (you may know him from the sketch troupe Pappy's, but to be honest, it's more likely that you don't know him - he is unimportant) got on and stood right next to me. He was holding a long piece of thin wood, that looked like it should maybe be holding up an estate agents sign. But it wasn't. But he's a comedian. He's allowed to travel on the underground holding unusual things. It was probably a prop of some kind for one of his zany sketches. Or maybe things have got so bad for him that he saw it lying around and stole it, thinking he might be able to get something on the black market for it.
It still felt like quite a chance meeting. He was heading out to a gig some distance from mine, but he still happened to get on the same tube as me, at the same door. Have you seen the film Sliding Doors? It's shit isn't it. Utter rubbish.
What were the chances of us meeting like that? Fairly small. But only if you had had to predict the exact person I would meet and at the exact time. If you look at it in terms of all the people I pass in a day and then think of all the people that I know, it's probably not that incredible that I would happen to see one of them once every few months. Also he's a comedian and is likely to find himself in the same places as me at around the same times. But even so it felt like forces beyond our control had brought us together. Or that Crosby might be stalking me and had accidentally got too close - perhaps the long bit of wood was there so that he could measure distance and ensure he never got too close.
But today, I was on my way to the Udderbelly on the South Bank. And as I walked up the road from the tube, who should be heading in the other direction. It was chimpy Matthew Crosby. For the second time in four days, in the same place at the same time as me. He had no odd bit of wood with him this time and if he was stalking me he was doing it very cleverly as he was coming from some way away and unless he's working as part of a stalking team couldn't have known where I was. In a sense it was less spooky as he was leaving the comedy venue that I was approaching, but still, we still happened to be there at the same time and given we'd bumped into each other just four days before it did seem a bit spooky. And given how little time I have been spending in London it's even stranger.
Perhaps fate is trying to get us together and to be honest the more I think about it, the more I see that we'd be a great pairing. We both like Nandos. I am attracted to small simian creatures..... that's it, but that's enough surely. And if Cupid is trying to hook us up who are we to stand in the way of a tiny, flying, tooled-up baby?
I suppose it's possible that I am stalking Crosby but am somehow managing to convince myself that it's the other way round. But otherwise there is literally no explanation for this ten trillion to one coincidence.
He's a nice person to bump into as he's friendly and funny and if he gets boring I just have to imagine him trying to move a piano up some stairs and then drinking a cup of tea. There are plenty of people that I wouldn't like to meet in this random way, (and let's face it, from his perspective I might be one of those people). It's just strange what surprises a city the size of London can throw up.
But if I go into the bathroom in my flat in Harpenden now and find Crosby having a bath I will begin to suspect there's something going on.
