Subliminal attraction

I once read, many years ago, that if you were in a room with a whole load of people you didn't know at all, then you would nevertheless end up talking to people with whom you shared things in common. I've often found this to be the case.

Take yesterday, for instance. I wanted to try out a new singing class as I shall soon be teaching on Thursdays myself, which means I can no longer take lessons with Sylvia Dürnhöfer. Shame. So I went to try out a class with a teacher called Grant Sung (a student of conducting from Hong Kong).

I got there and the three rows of seats were already pretty full. I hung about waiting to ask the teacher if I could try the class out. No problem. Where to sit? There were some seats free in the front row so I sat next to a woman whose looks reminded me of me and my old school friend Karen.

Some time during the lesson, we had an exercise involving singing numbers going up and down in a particular pattern. I turned to the woman next to me and said, in German, "That's so difficult. I prefer words to numbers and English is my first language so it's even harder to sing numbers so fast in a foreign language."

She then told me that her first language was also English. It turns out that she comes from Birkenhead - not far from where I come from in Wales. She'd also studied German, and worked as an English Language Assistant Teacher, which is how we both came to live in Germany.

When I came back here again in 1999, I had intended to stay for three years then swan off to France. She intended staying here for one year and now that one year has turned into decades.

And like me, she ended up translating.

What are the chances that, given at least six seating options in a room full of strangers, I ended up sitting next to the person that most resembled me and who, like me, was just there to try the class out? Spooky.