On the occasions when I allow myself to think about it, I find it frightening just how much of life depends on sheer coincidence. Even during my most religious moments I have never believed in predestination, but I can appreciate that in a way it must be rather a nice sort of belief to have. I can see the attraction of believing that everything in the world is following the well-ordered plan of a higher being and thus that ultimately, everything will turn out to be okay. The alternative, that we are blindly fumbling our way through a random chaos where a split second can change the direction of our lives forever, is rather more frightening.

I was reflecting on this in the early hours of the morning when I couldn’t sleep, and it occurred to me that it really is split second coincidences which define our lives. It is easy to look back at the big events in life as being definitive, but most of these big events would not have been possible had something much smaller and of seemingly less consequence happened first. It fascinates me to try to isolate such crucial moments, and imagine how life would be if I had blinked and missed them.

The first defining moment in my own life happened in August 2001 when I was halfway down a mountain called the Rothorn, just above the village of Lenzerheide in the Swiss canton of Graubuenden. The Rothorn is a perculiar mountain - at 2865m frustratingly short of the magical 3000m, and yet high enough to make you feel dizzy and sick if you move too quickly. It’s a very barren sort of place, and when you emerge from the cable car at the top you are projected into a rocky, god-forsaken environment where the temperature hovers around freezing even on the hottest summer days. It’s actually a site of special geological interest, the interesting red colour of some of the rocks lending the mountain its name, but I’ve never found it a particularly appealing landscape. The extreme rockiness means the walking is quite difficult underfoot, and for some obscure reason we had decided to embark on the most exhausting walk of all - climbing back down the mountain and back to the villlage. The path was in places horrendous, washed away by the prior year’s avalanches, and by the time it got to mid afternoon we were all throughly tired and fed up. We had covered nowhere near as much ground as we needed to during the earlier part of the day, and this was a major problem as there was now some danger of us missing the last bus of the day back to the town of Davos where we were staying, a good hour away in a different valley.

For this reason we were practically running along sections of the track where the terrain allowed it, and always having been a rather clumsy person, at one point I slipped and fell. I landed half in a stream, and found myself being unceremoniously dragged to my feet again by a random German cyclist. He tried to speak to me, I guess he was asking if I was okay, but the less than eighteen months German I had managed to study at school didn’t permit me to embark on a conversation, and so I was reduced to just smiling politely. He was young though, and exceptionally good looking in his little German-shorts and whilst I was contemplating his legs, I had a sort of epiphany

My first thought was that German boys seemed to be more attractive than English boys, and that therefore it would be nice to be able to talk to German boys. My second thought was indeed not a new thought but something I had been thinking repeatedly for at least two years - how amazingly wonderful it would be to be able to understand the German language. To be able to read German books and talk to German people and understand German announcements on trains to prevent such instances as them uncoupling your carriage and sending it forty miles in a direction you weren’t trying to go in without you realising (it’s very upsetting when that happens!). The new thought this time, however, and to me a truly startling one was this: that speaking German didn’t have to remain a little fantasy which I played out in my mind every year when I came on holiday, but that I could actually do something about it! People learn languages, after all, and I was confident that I was of average intelligence and should be able to accomplish it with a bit of hard work.

It must sound dumb to say that that was the first point at which it ever occurred to me that I could learn a language, but it’s actually true I spent the rest of the mad dash down the mountain barely heeding the pain I was in as I plotted how I was going to achieve my goal. I calculated how many days dinner money I would need to save before I could afford to buy myself a textbook, and plotted which day of the week I would be able to give my sister the slip and sneak to Waterstones to buy one. When school started back in September, I managed it within the first week and by virtue of counting out an embarrassing quantity of coppers, which at that point in time represented all the money I possessed in the world I was able to exit the proud owner of not only a Berlitz beginner’s German, but also a pocket German dictionary which I still possess til this day. I started learning German with far more diligence than I was applying to my actual A Levels, and precisely one year later passed a test at uni which allowed me to take a course which technically required an A Level pass The rest is history…

My ability or otherwise to speak German is not, however, really the point. That in itself does not represent a crucial part of my life, but it is a pivotal moment because of everything which followed from that decision. Everything that followed from that decision is so lengthy that it would need a novel to adequately recount it, but suffice it to say that had it not been for that one moment, I would be a substantially different person to who I am today. A much poorer person, I think. There are some experiences I would gladly have missed out on. An attempt to prosecute me springs to mind. But there are other far more positive things which came out of that decision. Not least, I genuinely believe that had I not secretly begun to learn German and over time converted my whole family to its charms, there is no way my sister would be studying in Tuebingen today.

The reason I am rambling thus is because yesterday marked exactly two years since the second such pivotal moment in my life. Two years ago yesterday lunchtime my sister drew attention to a member of the Munich Esperanto Club who was manning a stall on the left hand side of the Marienplatz in Munich city centre. At the time, I could quite happily have killed her. There were personal reasons why the very word Esperanto conjured up thoughts and memories which I was desperately trying to suppress that day. I had indeed seen the stall myself about half an hour earlier, felt a stab of pain, and by means of frantic conversation about Hugendhubel, the excellent book shop on the opposite side of Marienplatz, contrived to steer my sister away from it before she commented. I was now, however, forced to acknowledge the random presence of unknown Esperantists in the middle of Munich on a Bank Holiday Saturday. More than that, I was forced to go up and do the one thing I had been trying to avoid - speak to them.

At the time, quite frankly I just wanted to cry. Yet with the benefit of two year’s hindsight it is quite amazing how different life might have been had I not done so. Where would I indeed be now? I would like to flatter myself that I would still be alive today. That isn’t absolutely 100% a given, but I would like to credit myself with the strength to have not done something utterly stupid. I think there are two probable scenarios. The first is that I would have had some sort of mental breakdown. That strikes me as highly probable to be honest, because I was in such a fragile mental state that it would not have taken very much to fall apart. Presumably a psychiatrist would have gone to the trouble of gluing me back together again, but they might not necessarily have done it in the right order so that I could have ended up a very different person. The second probable scenario is that I would have bought a house in Birmingham and be getting married next month.

Phrased like that, it makes it seem like my chance encounter in Munich has actually caused me to miss out. June 2008 was always the month I was supposed to get married - for years and years I had worked towards it. It always seemed so far away, a date which would never actually be attained in reality, and so it shocks me to think that it is actually next month I wonder if my ex remembers and is shocked as well. It was always his idea, the marriage thing, and in some ways it was an attractive proposition. The idea that instead I am now going to live with someone outside of marriage breaks my heart, but to have married my ex would have been an even graver mistake. You cannot marry someone because they have had an accident which makes you feel sorry for them, and you cannot marry someone because it is convenient

Of course, this is a very pessimistic view of my fate. The argument can be turned on its head if we consider the opportunities I may have missed out on by being in Munich that day. Who knows, perhaps if I had been in Frankfurt I would have met a tall, dark, handsome guy with a healthy bank balance and a defined benefit pension scheme

What did I get instead? The encounter in Marienplatz led me to a more crucial encounter three days later with someone who was so intensely irritating that he provided just the distraction I needed to think about things other than my personal problems. It led me in essence to a hobby, which for a couple of months gave me a reason to get up in the morning. I gained a lot of support, without which I think I would have struggled to make the recovery I have, and once I had sufficiently recovered to take note of what was under my nose I found I was actually falling for the aforementioned intensely irritating Esperantist I don’t particularly enjoy looking back over the past two years as the overwhelming feeling which hits me is one of shame, but nevertheless life goes on and despite everything, I am a vastly more balanced person than I was this day two years ago and that for me makes it an anniversary worth celebrating It goes without saying that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to the blasted Esperantist for the time he spent on me I didn’t repay you very well on that investment and I’m sorry

On a brighter note, however, yesterday also brought some good news which makes the future seem a lot more realistic prospect than it did before

Tags: coincidence, Esperanto, Munich

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