Sometimes I imagine bumping into people from my past.

I suspect most of us do this at various points in our lives. From Former lovers and forgotten friends to old enemies and sworn adversaries. 

Rarely do these thoughts occur at random. They might be triggered by a song playing on the radio, a photo shared on WhatsApp, an advert for a product you used to buy, or any manner of other stimuli. Mine are a product of my immediate environment – location, location, location. I associate people with places and, having lived in London for almost two decades, every location I pass through now carries its own set of ghosts.

Wherever I step, there’s the possibility that past will become present and these ghosts will spring to life in my mind. If you happen upon me walking through St. Pancras train station or along a random Soho street (itself a rather unlikely encounter), there’s a good chance I’ll be lost in imagined internal dialogue with such spectres of yesteryear. I’ll be giving a piece of my mind to that most hated former boss who betrayed me; I’ll be apologising to the dead friend whose life I foolishly spent a decade trying to fix but succeeded only in letting her down repeatedly; I’ll be attempting to atone for a prior humiliation at the altar of the girl who got away. 

Come to think of it, there were a lot of girls who got away, most of them justifiably taking flight once they saw my gangly frame ill-advisedly stumbling towards their altar. I have much to atone for in this conversational world that never was and never will be. 

And let’s be clear: these conversations can and should never be. The people we’re thinking about probably aren’t thinking about us (especially not if they’re dead). There’s a very low likelihood that the people we want to bump into have any interest in bumping into us. 

All things considered, probability is not on our side. Such encounters shouldn’t even be occurring in the first place, not unless we’re social stalking (or actual stalking) the person with whom we hope to ‘unexpectedly’ cross paths. The world is sufficiently big and the lives of others sufficiently different to render the phenomena a non-starter. 

Probability is not really my bag, but while I may be a lousy mathematician, I’ve lived long enough to work out that we never bump into the people we actually want to bump into (especially not if they’re dead). That said, I once ran into my northern soul Natalie near the Bluefin building, which in case you’re unfamiliar is just about equidistant between Blackfriars bridge and Southwark bridge.

I was on the way from a random meeting at Waterloo, at a random time of day, on my way to a random catch up with a random friend. I hadn’t seen her in five years and then, all of a sudden, there she was on the street: my fleeting teenage sweetheart, later my fine friend of early adulthood and fellow founding member of an under-appreciated indie-rock band. There I found her, surveying the Southwark Street traffic, 200 miles from her home and surrounded by the teenagers she was busy shepherding from somewhere or other to somewhere or other. 

Once we were done with our respective dumbfounded exclamations, we scarcely had anything to say to one another.