ABOUT five miles from Derry city is Inch Wildfowl Reserve, which is one of the best places in Europe to bird-watch as it is a major stopover for migratory birds from three continents.

There is also a stunning five/six-mile circular walk which takes you round Inch Lake. If you’re ever in the area, take the time out and go see it.

Last Saturday myself and my wife decided to do our weekly visit and as we arrived at the car park, I could see she was immediately enamoured by a lovely-looking motor home already parked up near the lake.

She even took a picture of it, as there was clearly no-one about.

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Anyway, to cut to the chase, when we came back about an hour later there was guy standing outside it, cleaning a mat, and as I went past I remarked: “My wife absolutely loves your van… she says you’re living her life.”

He started to laugh, remarking: “Everyone says that…”

We got chatting, as you do, and my wife asked him why had he called his vehicle Rosie.

He responded immediately with a frankness that I certainly wasn’t expecting.

“When myself and my wife split up I decided I would go look for the woman I loved in my young days.

“I spent a good while looking for her, only to learn that she died at 27. So then I decided to change my life, go travelling, and I bought this motor home.

“And as most of them have names, I called it Rosie after that woman I loved in my youth.”

He spoke with a clear English accent and the vehicle was English-registered, so when I asked him his name and he replied “Pat”, I got a bit of a strange sensation.

Here’s the thing. As we walked away, I wondered was there some way we got to live the life he didn’t, seeing that I’m called Pat and my wife is called Rosie.

Life can be full of really odd coincidences… or is there a lot more to it than that?

Let me go a bit further with this.

As a young reporter, I knew a guy called Ward from south-west Donegal and one day we were chatting and he told me a story of his brother, Michael, in New York.

In the early 1970s, Michael was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, where somewhere in the region of 40/50,000 pedestrians daily pass over the one-mile stretch.

This day he accidentally bumped into someone, said sorry, and the next thing he heard was: “Is that a Donegal accent?”

He replied that it was, and the two strangers on the bridge stopped to chat.

Our Michael was from around the Glencolmcille area and it turned out the other fella was from Carrick, not exactly light years away from each other.

As they were parting, our guy shouted out to his new friend: “By the way, what’s your name?”

The response nearly floored him… “Michael Ward”.

To this day I would suggest you’d have better odds of winning the lottery than of two Michael Wards from Donegal bumping into each other in a bridge traversed by around 300,000 people every week.

One more personal story is that of a young lad whose mother died when he was a child and he came to stay with us for several years.

After university he emigrated to the continent and has worked there ever since.

About 10 years ago he was on holidays, stayed with us, and asked this particular day would I leave him down at the place where he grew up.

There is a lovely walkway near his old home, and as the sun was splitting the rocks, we parked the car so that we could get a good long stroll along the coastal path.

At the turning point, he went left to go to his old home and I turned right to come back the three/four miles to where I had parked.

What was really odd was that as I walked along, I noted there was zero breeze but there was a feather floating about waist-high beside me.

I kept watching it, thinking it was distinctly odd… no breeze yet here it was.

I watched it for more than 100 yards, then decided to grab it and put it in my pocket.

When I got home, it was gone.

It never happened to me before nor since, and I would have thought no more about that episode except months later I was sitting at home, grazing for something to pass an hour, when a programme with an American clairvoyant, John Edward, came on.

Normally I am not a particularly big fan of this kind of show, but as I was about to switch off, a lady came on and started telling him a story about a feather following her, a story not dissimilar to mine, so I decided to keep watching.

And Edward came back with the line that has stayed with me since: that a feather is a sign from a loved one who has passed, suggesting they’re nearby or watching over you.

Here’s the truth. The thought occurred to me just then – was that young fella’s mother somewhere out there watching us?

I had a friend, a Catholic priest, who frequently suggested that throughout our lives we get messages from the spirit world, but we have all become “too sophisticated, too cynical” – as he described it – and dismiss them as simply coincidences.

He didn’t believe there was any such things as coincidences. We ignore messages in this modern world because we don’t want to be thought gauche or naïve, we don’t like to laughed at or scoffed at.

Who knows, maybe – keeping in mind the time of year – a bit of reflection on all these ‘coincidences’ would be no bad thing!

Happy Easter.

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