Before catching another doomed train back to Manchester on Friday evening, I passed the Doric Arch. You know the place (you probably don’t). The underachieving pub adjoining Euston Station – next to the bus terminus – that people tend to overlook in favour of the more modern upstairs bar within the station itself, or the mysteriously popular tap room with its suspiciously sticky floor. I mention it because it’s where one of the strangest chance encounters of my life concluded.

Back in 2010, a London cabbie – and, I should note, a total stranger – took me for a pint there. He wasn’t on the job at the time, and it remains pretty much the only occasion on which a stranger has invited me for an impromptu drink, which is almost certainly why I remember it so clearly.

The pint at the Doric Arch – or was it two? I forget – followed a two-and-a-half-hour drinking session on the train from Manchester to London. The cabbie had been to watch Chelsea away at Old Trafford. Didier Drogba had stolen a goal to seal the victory, and my new acquaintance fancied a drink or two to celebrate. What caught me unawares was when, without so much as an introductory hello, he announced that he was heading to the buffet car and asked if I wanted a beer. What surprised me even more was the fact that I said yes.

Our conversation focused mainly on football, a little on cab driving, and a fair amount on drinking. He appeared to be a particularly committed drinker. Ironically, twelve months later I would find myself running a nationwide eco-friendly driving competition featuring two dozen black cab drivers, and felt very much at home from day one as a result of this chance encounter. It’s a shame we didn’t exchange details, but such is life.

Chance encounters have always been a feature of my experience, despite an enduring combination of shyness and social unease. I suspect it’s down to my equally extreme Englishness. Perhaps you’ve been reading these musings long enough to remember my Covid-era DNA test, which revealed that I am overwhelmingly English. I am excessively reserved and make a concerted effort to be polite at all times, the upshot of which is that once someone starts talking to me, I have very little mechanism for bringing the conversation to an end. Which is how these encounters ever happen in the first place.

About a year on from the cabbie drinking session, I had one of the great conversations of my life, again on the West Coast mainline, this time with a sex worker who sat down next to me and began grilling me on everything under the sun. Prior to the interaction, I would have described my prudishness as quasi-Victorian. After meeting her, I saw the world in a new light and credit her with fundamentally uprooting the judgementalism that had blighted my perspective for my entire cognitive life up until that point.

“What exactly did she say to you?” I hear you ask. Sorry, but that’s going to remain between the two of us.

Again, no contact details were exchanged at the end of our glorious exchange (of words, not fluids). On this occasion, I admit I was tempted to ask for her number, but held back for fear that the nature of my request might be misconstrued. That was the wrong call, and I regret missing the chance to consolidate what felt like the beginnings of a new friendship. 

Once you notice the pattern, it’s hard to stop seeing it. The affable chap in New York who had recently been in a knife fight and was bleeding from the cheek while chatting away quite happily. The banker in Crete who took a shine to Brendan and me and invited us to his pool party the following day, an event at which I may have felt more out of place than at any other moment in my life; I haven’t attended a pool party since. The pothead in Denver who struck up a conversation about music outside the bar opposite the tattoo parlour and invited us back to his house for an impromptu jam. We went along with it. Of course we did.

Come to think of it, those last three examples all involved Brendan. I don’t know what that says about the two of us, but whatever it is, I like it. Possibly that we look like we’re interested.

When I became a parent, I naturally assumed it would bring the glorious era of chance encounters to a close. Spontaneity has certainly been stripped from much of our day-to-day life. And yet, I still feel a flicker of either trepidation or excitement whenever a stranger addresses me. At the time of writing, there’s an hour left of my current train journey. Anything could happen.