As a writer I’ve been warned against making too much use of coincidence as a plot device. Early drafts of my stories and novels quite often have characters fortuitously coming across the one piece of information or meeting the one person they needed to move things forward.

I think it’s partly because I see my own life as a series of coincidences. I always have to make sure that in the next draft I make the main character more active, less wafty so that they choose events rather than events choosing them.

But in real life, coincidences often crop up in ways that would never work in a piece of fiction.

Take yesterday, for example. Yesterday afternoon I had the excitement of going to the diabetic clinic to be fitted with a blood testing monitor that will take continuous readings for three days and then, hopefully, present me with a graph to let me know what my body gets up to when I’m not paying attention. Could be interesting!

The weird thing was that while I was waiting for the diabetic specialist nurse to see me I could hear a baby crying and I thought to myself, How funny, all babies sound just like my nephew. I suppose all babies sound the same.

Then when I went into my appointment, the nurse said, “Did you know your sister’s here seeing the other nurse?”

So it was my nephew!

I managed to get linked up to the monitor in time to catch my sis before she left and we went for a coffee afterwards, which was nice as we hadn’t caught up since Christmas. I suppose there are some curious advantages to both of us having diabetes.

The nurse seemed surprised that I hadn’t known she’d be there, but we don’t often discuss such boring things as diabetic appointments, so even if I’d seen her yesterday we probably wouldn’t have known we’d be at the hospital at the same time today.

My plot-lines may have a propensity for swinging from one coincidence to another, but one thing I do know is dialogue, and we have much more interesting things to talk about than that, at least, most of the time.

The bump

My sister’s baby is officially due in mid-July. Chances are he’s coming out a lot sooner.

Like me, my sis is diabetic, and one of the many issues regarding pregnancy and diabetes is that at this point the baby begins to grow. Enormously. Like something out of a sci-fi film.

In fact, in the past three weeks, Badger Bulldog has achieved an alarming seven-week’s-worth of expansion.

Having sailed through the first trimester with only tiredness and the occasional hint of nausea, Sis now has the issue of sporting a near nine-month belly with more than a month still to go.

The major issue is that though Badger is accelerating his growth, he’s not speeding up his development. This means his lungs, heart and other sort of important things are still at the stage of any other 7.5-month-old foetus.

Sis has been told that the optimum scenario is that Badger’ll make it to three weeks before the birth date, when he’ll officially be ‘cooked’.

Fingers crossed he’ll make it that long, and that my sis doesn’t burst at the seams in the meantime…