Coincidence is Fate in disguise

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I used to share a studio with Craig Winton in Edinburgh for a few years. He moved back out to His home in Wanganui a year ago with Amanda and their two Girls, Ella and Ruby. Upon making contact from Auckland I was kinda ordered down to see them both. So, booked the bus and made my way...

8 hours in and there was the familar face of my old friend waiting to pick me up. Craig and Amanda have a wonderful location in an equally wonderful place, and I was welcomed into a very artisitic community with open arms pretty instantly. Craigs place is set on the hill above Wanganui and has a fantastic view, or so he kept telling me, every day. For it seems if I wanted to come to NZ for the weather, I would have been better off staying in Scotland. Night after night I thought I was going to wake to a scene from Twister and see the corrugated roof flying off and up into the sky above. Funnily enough, it didn't happen.

What did happen, and was quite funny, was a number of coincedences in where I would have thought least likely. Craig is teaching Jewellery classes at the local Art School and asked me to come along and assist for them, and I did. What I found was in every class room, in every school of every town, I walked into the one that Had a direct connection with the very Art School I had just left in the UK, The Leith School of Art. Stuart Duffin is argueably the best artist of his medium in the world (and i am argueably the worst spellr of mine) and has limited edition number 16 of 30 of one of his works hagning in that classroom, the same print that My former boss, Phil Archer owns that I hung outside his office a few months earlier.

Stuart Duffin Mezzo Print

This, to me, seemed much more than coincedance, but then, thats just the kind of person I am. Fate in duisguise I would tend to reffer to it as. Stuart it seems, comes to Wagnaui, as well as Leith, to teach and by chance, so did I.

So, coincedance number one. Number two was that unrealised to me at the time, my old school has a link to St Georges there and send exchange students on gap years. Several of my friends have been there on theirs, and number three was due to the startling connectivity that Facebook seems to have opened us up to and I found that one of my cousins is best friends with Amandas best friend Anna. It is indeed, a small world.

Luck would also have it that on the last possible day to do so, and near enough the first time we could see it clearly, we got to go skiing on the mountian. I'll put up the video of Katie Brown if i can be bothered to sit twiddling my thumbs for the hours that it seems to take to upload any of these things! Katie Brown (and the Chrocicle Glass studios) however, brings me to my next blog about Wanganui...

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Photos

Meet the Maoris
Craig, Ella and Amanda

The view
Not short of what we all expcet back in Scotland. There is a mountian in the mist, somewhere.

Amanda and Anna
Facebook, love it or hate it, has shown us how small the world really is.

Comments

[Mum]

Coincidences
Wow Ian - that's a lot of coincidences - so glag you loved Wanganui - and great to see the pic of Craig, amanada the the girls - which of the cousins has the contact? Love and hugs Mum

[martin]

no shit lol
To say you cant spell is a bloody understatement! I'm going to send you a dictionary!! Hope your having a good time mate, does seem it. Hopefully catch you at the tables some time soon. Keep well