Back in the early 1980’s I was an engineer working for an oil company in the Sumatran jungle (Indonesia) and, due to the copious free time available and the lack of alternative entertainments ( this was a location known as ‘The Green Cage’ !), I was the Hon Sec of the golf club. As such it fell to me to liaise with the various sponsors of the, almost weekly, golf tournaments (there were some compensations for living there) and when they visited to take them out for a few holes of golf.
On one such occasion, I was entertaining a visitor from a service company based in Singapore who happened to originate from the NE of England in Gateshead, I mentioned that I had lived in near there at Whickham quite recently, when working there on a previous job. He remarked that it was, indeed, Whickham that he hailed from and the street that he grew up in was in close proximity to the street where I had resided.
Strange coincidence.
He then mentioned that his manager in Singapore also came from the very same local area and gave the name of the street where he owned a house. I asked his manager’s name and when told I recognised it as it was his house I had rented about two years earlier!
It is, sometimes, a very small world we live in.