Who's In Your Bed?

I have always loved a good statistic, and a coincidence. Sometimes, they are just as amazing as fiction.

While having my many discussions about religion and gods in the past, one of the facts that was thrown at me time and time again by religious types, the more intelligent ones, not the God will burn you for ever brigade, was that the odds of life forming on earth spontaneously are so incredibly unlikely. This is, of course, true (but far more likely than a God creating it!) One of the statistics I always used to show how improbable odds are quite common was that you are fifty times more likely to crash into the roof of your own house in a commercial jet than you are to win the lottery. But someone wins the lottery each week! Besides, scientists have created life in a laboratory, so I don't need to use that fact now.

But when it comes to coincidence and statistics, I heard a story from someone I know this week which is both incredible and scary.

A young man, who shall now be known as John (not his real name) was having a bad time of things. John was twenty years old and lived in the city of Manchester in north-west England. His mother had died a few years previously and his father had turned to drink to dull the pain of his loss. John had also recently split with his long term girlfriend and was quite down about this. Then, out of the blue, John was invited by a few of his friends to a summer holiday on the Spanish Island of Majorca. This, he thought, was just what he needed. What could be better than a few weeks of sun, sea, and partying?

They arrived on the Island in late June and soon set about drinking and trying to get as much sex as possible. But John couldn't get the thought of his ex-girlfriend from his mind and found that he wasn't up for the night life, so one night he decided to go back to his hotel early. On the way back he noticed the rear end of a woman sticking out of a set of shrubs around his hotel. Thinking the worst, he walked over, put his head in the bushes and saw a woman deep in thought. “Are you OK?” he asked. The woman climbed from the shrubs and explained that she had lost her room key and was trying to find it. John looked at this woman, who was a little older than him. She must have been in her mid thirties, but he couldn't help but think just how attractive she was. They got talking and they both found her key together. The woman's name was Sammy (not her real name). John asked her if she would like to go for a drink with him, to which she agreed. 

They hit it off instantly, having so much in common. He felt as if he had known her for years. Sammy also felt the same. They spent the rest of the holiday together, totally inseparable: if there's such a thing as love at first sight, this was it. They spent their days talking and their nights making love. When it was time to leave and go home, neither could bear to be separated from the other, so they agreed to meet up as soon as they got back to Britain. This was quite a trek for John, as Sammy lived in the seaside town of Paignton in Devon, which was a few hundred miles from where he lived.

They held a long distance relationship for a while, until one day Sammy asked him to move to Devon and live with her. He was over the moon and packed up and moved down the next week. The relationship grew,  and the age difference was irrelevant to John. Sammy had told him that she had had a chequered past and had gone to Majorca to flee a violent relationship, and that she had a dark secret that she dare not tell him. John didn't care. “We all have a past” he said, “and when the time's right, I'm sure that we can sit down and discuss whatever it is that you feel unable to tell me.” After a while of living together, one night after a walk on the beach John went down on one knee and proposed, and Sammy, in a flood of tears, accepted.

They had always been honest with each other. John had told her that he had been adopted at birth and that, because his adoptive mother had died, he would like to find his birth mother and if things worked out invite her to the wedding. Sammy thought this a wonderful idea and helped John with the use of an agency track down his birth mother. They wrote a letter together to this lady, explaining that whatever reason she had for giving him up, it didn't matter now. And that they were soon to be wed so could they meet up and talk? They gave the letter to the agency to post on and set about organising their wedding.

Two weeks later Sammy's dark secret came back to haunt her! While she was getting ready for work, a letter arrived through the door. Thinking it was about the soon-to-be wedding, she opened it, screamed and fainted. The letter was from John, saying that he would like to meet up with her. It was the letter that they had both sent to John's birth mother for the agency to pass on to his mother. Sammy had given him up for adoption twenty years earlier, when she was just fifteen! She was about to marry her own son!

I won't tell you what happened next, only to say that fact can be stranger than fiction sometimes.

I have checked out that my wife is not my long-lost sister (you can never tell with my family). It's ok, we are not related by blood, only by law. But when both my wife and I decided to marry, we had a night out with both sets of parents giving them a chance to get to know each other. So you can imagine how surprised we were when we found out that my father and my wife's mother knew each other. They used to go swimming together, and hung around in a gang together when they were young! Strange old world isn't it?