Denis: Speculating on alternative universes and Rolls Royces

Jun 26 2009 By Denis Kilcommons

WHEN my wife-to-be Maria was 16, her father wanted to send her to finishing school in Switzerland.

If he had done, we would quite possibly never have met.

As it happens, Maria put her foot down and said she didn’t want to leave her friends and her hometown of Blackpool and so, instead, she went to secretarial college.

The point is how different both our futures would have been. It makes you think about life’s coincidences and quirks.

If we had not met, when she was 16 and I was 23, we would not have had our two daughters or our two grandsons.

Four human beings who wouldn’t have been born but for the happenstance of our meeting, untrammelled by complications posed by ski instructors.

Maria would probably have made a much more financially successful marriage and would quite possibly now be living in a big house with a completely different brood of children and a Rolls Royce in the drive.

Didn’t she do well when she got hitched to me?

I would most likely have gone abroad again, probably to Rhodesia, then on to Australia.

But whichever way my path had led, everything would have been totally

different. The coincidences and quirks that led the pair of us here would not have been in place.

I would probably now be in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales. Or Surbiton.