When I write, I mostly write fiction. One of the key things a writer of fiction must do is engage the reader in the whole trick of the world of the fiction by taking care to construct a fabric that holds together of itself for the duration of the story. When a reader is able to look at the story and point to a bit that is accidentally out of kilter with the rest of the thing, they say, ‘But given all this other stuff, that bit couldn’t happen.’ So the fiction probably hasn’t succeeded. One of the devices that often causes the reader to feel cheated is the coincidence. If you are telling an account of what truly happened in your life, you sometimes do have to point to a coincidence. They do happen in real life, and people marvel at them and are delighted and puzzled and even frightened by them. But in the ordinary course of creating fiction, it is generally difficult for the writer to rely on coincidence for the development of the story. Writers often stay away from coincidence, or else put it boldly front and centre, or conceal it so that the reader doesn’t really notice. In The Great Gatsby, for instance, the fact that Nick Carraway happens to rent a house opposite the home of his cousin Daisy, and next door to Daisy’s old beau Gatsby, is almost never discussed. It’s a coincidence that is glossed over in the text, but it is vital to the action, without it there would be no story. Dickens cheerfully employed coincidence in his plots, but even there, so much is going on, so much drama, so much comedy, that readers can miss the device.

I want to reflect on the appearance of coincidence in what passes for real life. To begin with I will describe the images on two postcards: