A few weeks back a reader popped into the Chronicle office to complain about the state of Abergavenny’s roads.

As we chatted he revealed that he had once sold his house in Llanfoist to the late owner of the Chronicle, Sir Ray Tindle and I reminded him of a massive old table which had been left in the garage and which had been refurbished and had taken pride of place in our board room for many years.

During the conversation I mentioned that my family and I had also lived in the village when I was young and it eventually transpired that my visitor had been friends with the previous owners of our house and had spent many hours there. In a further co-incidence his wife - a solicitor - had acted on behalf of my parents when they first purchased the house.

He then mentioned that his family was originally from Abersychan and I shared that my grandfather’s family all lived in the town. In another strange co-incidence my visitor had been a regular visitor to the house in which they lived.

As the conversation continued we realised that he also had been friendly with the previous owners of our house in Lansdown Road and had spent a great deal of time there.

In a final and perhaps most dramatic twist he recounted that his first home in Abergavenny had been a pair of cottages his family had refurbished and knocked into one.

“This might be hard to believe but we live next door to that house,” I told him. “We were talking about you back in the summer when the neighbours came around for supper.The topic always gets around to the history of our houses and they mentioned that you had called in a few years ago to show your grandson a wall you had built.”

“I did,” he said. “I’d told him about the work we did on he houses and we dropped in by chance just to see if I could show him around. The people who live there now were lovely and let me take a look.”

This is a story I have recounted numerous times over the past few weeks as I was amazed that two people who have never met could find so much in common over the course of just one conversation.

In a final twist I was telling the story to the housemate’s son-in-law when he visited recently to help cut our front hedge.

“That’s amazing,” he said as we loaded the bags of greenery into his car to take to the tip.

“What’s even more amazing is that the man unloading the car next to us right now is the man I’ve just been telling you about,” I said as we pulled into the council yard.

Einstein once wrote that coincidences are God’s way of staying anonymous or as my old archaeology professor used to say - “one stone is a stone, two stones are a coincidence but three stones…that’s a wall!”

Or maybe it just goes to show that when people sit down and talk we really do have a lot more in common than we could ever imagine.