Extraordinary Coincidences

Extraordinary coincidences – synchronicities – are sometimes simply baffling and sometimes thrilling. Here are two recent ones. The laughter between Stephanie and Penny in the photo in the post below may come from a story Penny also told me. She decided to google herself (who hasn’t been tempted?) and discovered to her amazement that there is another Penny Billington – her doppelganger – who is also the editor of a magazine called ‘Touchstone’. So we have Penny Billington in England, editor of Druid magazine Touchstone and Penny Billington in Chicago, editor of the Christian magazine Touchstone.

And now today I’ve discovered this one. I’m writing a book about the tremendously rich subject of magic in England, and its current renaissance, with fellow author Richard Heygate, to be published by John Murray in 2009. And now I see that one of the fictional books mentioned by Susannah Clarke in her Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is “Essay on the Extraordinary Revival of English Magic,, &c.” (essay) by John Waterbury, Lord Portishead (John Murray: London, 1814). The subject is the same, the publisher is the same, and there’s even a correspondence in the authorship since toffs are involved in both – Richard is a Bart.

Curiouser and curiouser as Alice said…