More By Design Than Accident: It's one of those aspects of village life that I enjoy; people just start talking to one another and then bring someone else into a conversation simply by changing eye contact. A couple of years ago now, and in the queue to get some stamps at Upton Post Office; a woman, slightly older than me I imagined, was talking to another female friend. In a world of my own thinking about whatever, suddenly our eye contact happened to meet as she said: 'I think our lives' are decided from the moment we are born.'
After thinking this idea through myself from time to time, I said: 'No, from conception, I think; but probably even before that.'
She looked at me with a curious and dumbfounded expression.
'Just imagine,' I continued, 'we were conceived tonight; it would be a completely different sperm hitting a completely different egg had we been conceived yesterday or tomorrow. It would even be different yet again if our parents' had copulated at 8pm rather than 9 or 10pm; it is all very finite.'
'Really?' she said, still looking rather shaken.
'And yes, I think it is all decided from that moment of conception, what kind of person we will be, what job we will do, whether we marry or have children; right from that moment of fertilisation. And it gets even stranger than that. My parents had a daughter first, Barbara Anne, who passed when she was a couple of day's old. Then they had my brother, Robert, and had Barbara Anne lived they would have enjoyed the perfect boy / girl family; so I wouldn't be here talking to you now.'
By now, these two women must have wished they'd discussed this at home over a coffee.
'Conception also decides our Fate and Destiny, and to a degree it also controls our parallel worlds; or the how our lives would have been lived had we said 'Yes' to a certain question or decision rather than 'No,' or vice-versa. And some people believe those parallel worlds actually exist, where we are living out the decisions opposite to those we actually took; where it is the complete antethesis of our current history - like what our world would be like had there been no World War I or II?'
By now, the ladies were becoming somewhat befuddled, and wishing all the more they hadn't, perhaps, drawn me into the conversation. Their turn had arrived to be served, so they did their business and went, and then I did mine; and I have never seen either of them again since.
But it does make you think, doesn't it; and if you would like to read some excellent fiction in a complete parallel world to our own, then please read Mick Farren's two serial novels 'Kindling' and 'Conflagration;' they will astound you by their brilliance.