John moves across to the fridge and opens the door.

“Do you know when this arrived?” he asks.

I drop down onto the floor and creep slowly towards the door and peer inside. There is a large wheel of Cheese sitting in red-wax splendour on the middle shelf, occupying most of the space. I look at the cheese and then look at John. I miaow because I’ve no idea when this arrived. 

At this time, Mary appears in the kitchen and wanders over to see what we’re looking at. 

“Wow, when did this arrive?” she asks. “There’s a small note attached to it.” She picks up the cream-coloured envelope and opens it gently.

“Congratulations, your email address was selected out of over 50,000 others to receive this Gouda cheese. Enjoy the taste of Holland. Henk.”

“Who’s Henk?” asks John.

“Someone who knows how to find out our postal address from our email address,” replies Mary, “and I wonder which draw this was? I don’t remember entering a draw to win a cheese, large or small. Did you, John? By the way your skin looks worse now than it did two days ago.”

“I’ve put on half a bottle of after-sun scream this morning,” replies John, “the type that’s supposed to draw the heat out of the skin, so I hope it will calm down today. As for the cheese, I don’t enter contests to win food, so it wasn’t me, but I will help you eat it as I like Gouda especially on toast.”

Gemma chooses this moment to appear in the kitchen doorway and pads over to where I’m sitting.

“Hello Gemma,” says Mary, stroking Gemma on the top of the head.

“I see they’ve found the cheese then,” says Gemma, glancing at Mary, “have they said anything about Holland?”

“No, but neither of them can remember entering the contest to win the cheese.”

“Well, there’s a reason for that isn’t there,” replies Gemma, deciding she’ll rub herself around Mary’s legs by way of thanking her for the stroke on the head.

“Yes, how did they find out about the email address?”

“From Mrs Elkins, I presume,” replies Gemma, “it was on the piece of paper that Mary handed over to her just before they left.”

“I wouldn’t rub around John’s legs,” I say, “he’s put on some lotion that is supposed to help him with his sunburn.”

“Thank you, Freddie, that stuff would probably taste terrible when I wash my fur, anyway I will see you later.” Gemma trots away carefully avoiding John’s attempt at a stroke. 

Mary and John have pulled the cheese out of the fridge and are inspecting it with some interest.

“I wonder who Henk is?” asks John.

“I don’t know,” says Mary, “the organiser of the contest presumably.”

“Right, I suppose so, anyway I should get the washing done. It would be great to start off the work week tomorrow with a full complement of clean clothes.” With that, he ambles off downstairs to the washing machine and dryer. Mary places the cheese on the kitchen counter as they will be going out later to do the food shopping. 

I retire to the underneath of the couch and finish off the book The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler. This is a wonderful book and makes me realise how little I know and humans know about the world we inhabit. For many decades, extra-sensory perception (ESP) – including clairvoyance and telepathy – has been dismissed as illusion and fakery. ESP was compared with the world of physics as scientists thought it existed and dismissed as unimportant and contradictory to the established scientific norms.

But nowadays, with the advent of Quantum Physics breaking the established models of nature and the universe and introducing concepts such as particles travelling backwards in time and electrons being both a wave and a particle depending on whether they’re observed, ESP fits in more easily.

This book suggests it’s time for a new attitude towards parapsychology and that there is a natural law that leads to coincidences occurring.

This book is worth reading for the story about how Dr Soal of University College London was conducting experiments with people ‘predicting’ what Zener cards would be turned up by a researcher in another room. For many years he found no results that were out of the ordinary until a colleague Whately Carington suggested Soal check guesses for the card after the one turned up by the researcher.

Soal was delighted and disconcerted to discover that one man, Basil Shackleton, had scored consistently on the next card ahead with results so high that chance had to be ruled out. The time interval between two guesses which Shackleton found most congenial was 2.6 seconds. At this rate, he consistently guessed at the next card to be turned up. If, however, the rate of turning up cards was speeded up to about half that time then he guessed just as consistently the card that would turn up two ahead. In other words, Basil was fixated on an event that would occur 2.6 seconds into the future.

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Julian Worker’s books can be found here