The Big Read:Walking the mountain of chance

14 April 2014 - 02:01 By Darrel Bristow-Bovey
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In a random group of 23 strangers there's a 50% chance of two people sharing a birthday.

People who understand numbers and probability assure me that coincidences aren't as rare as we think, that paths cross all the time and the workings of chance bring implausible things together, and we don't need to tell stories to explain these seemingly extraordinary events.

Which may be true, but when it comes to maths I'm a bumbler and a finger-counter, so I still enjoy a good coincidence when it comes ambling round the corner wearing the same shirt as me.

A few years ago I was walking in the Taurus Mountains, in the warm foothills of snowy Mount Olympos, and I met a policeman from Bristol and his wife, a nursery school teacher, who were on a hiking holiday to celebrate his birthday. We introduced ourselves and she said her name was Sandra and he said his name was Clive.

"Clive is a naff name," I said.

"Darrel thinks Clive is a naff name?" he said, and we laughed. I was walking alone that day so we walked together and argued about nominative determinism and swapped tales of derring-do and crime-busting on the Welsh frontier. Sandra was deathly afraid of slithery things so when I saw a snake in some brushwood and yelped and jumped onto a log like a cartoon elephant who's seen a mouse, Clive and I pretended I'd seen a spider.

We walked all day over a mountain to the next village but we must have crossed paths with another trail and when we finally came down we discovered we'd returned almost to the place where we'd started. Such things bond people even more than stories of Welsh crime-fighting, so that evening we shared dinner and a bottle of raki at a wooden table beside a river strung with yellow lanterns. I told them to visit South Africa but Sandra was afraid of the snakes and I swore that I have never seen a snake while walking in South Africa, which is true, and later I swore that in fact there are no snakes in South Africa, which I don't have to tell you was a lie, but the good kind of lie, told extravagantly over the last of the bottle by a laughing fellow rover.

I overslept the next morning and woke hungover in a rush to catch a transfer and I forgot to leave them my contact details. We knew each other by only our first names and I realised it was one of those fleeting encounters that you have when you travel that are sweeter for their fleetness, but I was sad because there had been the first fragile sparks of friendship and, while life is filled with people you meet and enjoy for a day, especially while travelling, the possibility of friendship is rare and not carelessly to be left behind.

This week was my birthday and to mark it I took a long walk alone on the mountain, following a track that leads to an overhang cave and beyond that to another cave where I used to walk with a friend on January 1 each year and also sometimes on our birthdays. We would sit in the shade and drink from a hip flask and eat tuna sandwiches and, for some reason, carrot cake and look out over the empty air and talk about life and our choices and growing older. He wasn't there this time, and I thought about the curious maths of ageing, how if you're not careful it can feel like subtraction instead of addition.

I sat on a flat rock and looked out at the sea and the sun on it and tried to call up all my birthdays and string them together like a stop-motion animation leading to now, and I thought about friendship and why it ends, and I thought it was good to be alone but it would also be good to have company.

Then a voice said: "Well, well, well", and Clive and Sandra from Bristol sat down beside me. I was too surprised to feel surprise. They had been on holiday for a week and this was their last day; they had already checked out of their hotel and were taking a last walk before driving to the airport.

Our conversation that night had given them the idea to come out, and every day they'd been out here they'd studied the faces of passers-by, hoping to bump into me. I had some wine with me and we sat in the cool shade with the heat rising from the slope below and we toasted my birthday, and new friendships, and lucky chance. On the way down we saw a snake.

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