A curious little addendum to Sunday's post.

Following Dante's dental operation, we stayed in Cork (where the hospital was) overnight, then headed back home around lunchtime on Saturday. We stopped in a town called Mallow to get something to eat. We pulled into the car park, and were in the middle of getting the kids out, when the driver in the car next to us also got out and said something along the lines of, "Fancy bumping into you freaks here!"

It was Liam, an old childhood friend of mine, who is also the designer for my web site. Yep, by chance (or Des Tiny?) we'd parked next to him, even though we hadn't been in touch in ages, and went and had a very nice lunch with him and his family.
I sometimes worry about including too many strange coincidences in my books. It's something you have to do as an author, arrange things so that the paths of various characters collide, and on occasion it can feel forced and unbelievable. Charles Dickens included some real whoppers in his work, and yes, I suppose I've included some whale-size whoppers in my stories too.

But then something like this happens and I'm reminded that we live in a world where eyebrow-raising coincidences DO really happen, and things that you wouldn't believe in a book are accepted at face value every day in the real world because... well, because they're real. Or to put it another way...

Fiction ain't got nothing on fact, Jack, and Des Tiny fills in all the cracks! :-)