On spooky coincidences

On spooky coincidences

There's nothing like a bit of spooky coincidence to get easily-impressed people saying "WoooOOooOOOoooOooo" at the end of your tale.

So. Spooky coincidence.

A Sunday in summer.

A warm summer Sunday back in the days when the family would pile in the car, go out for a (95% liquid) pub lunch, then pile back into the car before embarking on what was known back then as a "drive".

Ah yes. The Sunday drive. That 1970s mystery tour from an age where cars were a luxury rather than a necessity, where you could take off into the country and not have some drum'n'bass twat stuck up your arse for miles on end. As it were.

And then – you'd end up somewhere. Quite often in the woods, before The Man cut them all down to build housing estates, right kids?

This time, after a liquid lunch down the social club in Twyford, where we kids amused ourselves with an energetic game of "Dodge Dart" against the local council estate brats, we piled into our second-hand Renault 12 (honestly, we're suckers for French cars) and headed north.

North. Far further north than usual, in fact. Our usual limit were the roads around Henley-on-Thames, where we'd run into little marvels like the Maharajah's Well, or the aerial farm at Crowsley Park (where your humble author would one day earn a living).

But we pressed on. And as we did, the weather turned.

It had started a bright sunny afternoon, but the clouds rolled in, the sky became as black as Armageddon, and the temperature dropped off the scale.

And then, the skies opened.

But didn't rain. It snowed, the trees given a white coating as freak weather turned summer into winter all within a matter of minutes.

Struggling to see where we were heading, we entered a village.

"Welcome," said the sign thoughtfully provided by Oxfordshire County Council, "Welcome to Christmas Common."

"WoooOOooOOOoooOooo"