Home sweet Home

If I sit down at the end of the month and do a Wordle of this month’s posts I am hoping that the word ‘Coincidence’ will feature clearly.

It would be nice if the world Wall stands out too – even though I have been unable to keep a sub theme of ‘walls” running parallel to my main focus, the related nature of unrelated incidents.

Yep, coincidence is everywhere this month.

For example, the other day I was struggling and turned to Google for inspiration and among the things that the search engine turned up was a list of the all time greatest coincidental events.

One of them (no 11) centred on the surname Bingham that, coincidentally featured in my post yesterday!

And then the other day Janet, whom I only know through the coincidence of coincidence, read my post and offered all this!

But let’s go back to ‘walls”.

For the first 11 years of my life I lived at no 17 Willersley Avenue and my next-door neighbours were the Walls.

Their daughter – Rosalind Wall (Rosie for short)– was my first friend and we would often play together, though strangely whatever the make believe game we played she always wanted to be the monkey.

Some of those scenarios got pretty weird.

At one point when we must have been about five we decided to go to the park together - I think it was her idea.
Unfortunately we forgot to tell anyone else before we set off.

To get to the park, something we must have done several times with our mothers, you had to go up the road, through the wood, up another road, turn left go along that one for quite a way, turn again and after a long walk arrive at the park.
We had a great time and then came home.

It was difficult for the five year old me to say exactly how long we had been gone, certainly long enough for the police to have been called and the search to have commenced.

It was possible for the five year old me to remember how long the week was that neither of us were allowed out for.
On another occasion Rosalind was playing in her back garden and I saw her over the fence.

“Hey, do you want to come around and play?”
“I can’t, I have mumps.”
“Ok, I’ll come over there.”
“Ok”

We got in trouble for that too.

Where I live now I don’t have neighbours, the house stands alone in fields and forest so when my son was young there wasn’t a friend ‘next-door’.

Among the friends I made there was one, Martin, who it turned out had been working a hundred yards from where I had been working several years previously in London.

We had probably even played football together, as the street performers (me) and the stallholders (he) did occasionally in the mornings waiting for the market in Covent Garden to come alive.

Martin had a young daughter the same age as my son and they became ‘first friends’ too.

Her name?

Rosie.