‘Small world, isn’t it?’ ‘I just knew that would happen’ ‘What an amazing coincidence!’ We’ve all been there, but are they just coincidences? What else might be at work to help us?

I just knew that bird was going to fly out of the bush, across the path and over the road. Not just any bird but that very precise bird. Not just any bush, but that particular place in the bush. Not just any road, but my road which seemed long and big when I was just eight years old.

It happened in my head a minute before it happened in reality. It was like a video which then got enacted precisely in the way I had seen. At eight years old you just remember it happening. It doesn’t worry you. Doesn’t everybody see things in advance?

I didn’t know then that It was the first of a number of premonitions, thought transferences and deja vus that I would experience.

Fast forward forty years and I’m in an anxious state in an office block of 22 stories.

I’m in the office of the Chairman and Chief Executive on the 12th floor, trying to get him to make a decision in my favour about a proposal for multi million pounds expenditure. I had worked on the proposal for months, lots of documentation, lots of pre selling, and now this was to be the final meeting.

As he warmed to the idea and asked for more and more facts, I realized to my horror that one of the key pages with those facts was not in my hand. It wasn’t on his desk. It was somewhere in my office on the 19th floor. This moment could not be lost. Inevitably he got to the point where the missing paper was needed. He asked the question I knew he’d ask, which the paper held the answer to.

‘I’ll have to go and get that’ I said ‘it’s all documented’. ‘Don’t worry’ he said ‘we’ll pick it up another time’. Oh no, we won’t, that would be a disastrous delay; the flow was happening, the moment was now.

Making my excuses, I raced to the lift and sped up to the 19 floor. The office was almost deserted as it was now nearly 1900. I knew where the piece of paper had gone - into my PA’s filing system. She had long gone home. I approached her desk and saw two large piles of papers for filing. I might have had an anxious sinking feeling, but instead I had a sixth sense (just like with the bird from the bush). I knew which pile it was and knew precisely where the right sheet of paper would be amongst 100 others. I saw it in my mind halfway down. I went straight to it. It didn’t seem strange, it just seemed natural. But I breathed a thank you to someone or something that enabled it to happen.

Down on the 12th floor the Chairman was getting impatient and I arrived just in time, as he was packing his bag. ‘This is what we need’ I said and indeed it was. The day had been saved, the decision was taken, and whatever had led me to that piece of paper had been my salvation.