Last week, I got talking to a chap who was taking his 2 dogs for a walk down the lane. I picked up from his accent that he wasn’t local and he told me he’d been living in the village about 9 years, just round the corner from us. I asked him where he was from and he said Eastbourne in Sussex, my home County, so yes it is a small world, but it got even more surprising.
We chatted about moving down hear and he told me, he’d decided to retire to this part of the world so I naturally asked what he did when he was working. I used to work for the Council looking after sports grounds he said, you know preparing and maintaining football pitches and cricket wickets. I told him I was from Brighton and used to do the same sort of thing.
I know Brighton, he said, I used to go to a horticultural training centre just outside the City when I was doing my City and Guilds back in the mid 1970s, at a place called Stanmer Park. You’re kidding me, I said, I was the gardener/practical trainer at the centre about that time, so we would have met all those years ago………. what are the chances of that!!