Not a magnificent day, but who knows it might not be a significant one. Perhaps somewhere on the planet someone has discovered something we didn't know before, another piece fitted into the cosmic jigsaw. Did you know that apparently, sickle cell anaemia provides protection from malaria? No? Its rather like saying that having your legs cut off will protect you from Athlete's Foot. Stay tuned for more exciting discoveries.

History isn't always what you are taught at school, and you should always dig a little deeper as the following item indicates.

I believed, until today, that when the USA dropped the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that the Japanese just went ahead and surrendered. Not quite so. The Japanese Emperor told his cabinet to surrender and recorded his surrender speech but there was a military coup which could have prevented it being broadcast. The plotters took over the Imperial palace and started searching for the recordings but, by sheer coincidence, the last B29 raid on Japan on the last Japanese oil refineries north of Tokyo triggered a power blackout in Tokyo at exactly the same time as they began their search. The plotters didn't find the recordings and that gave enough time for army elements loyal to the Emperor to save him and allow the surrender broadcast to be made. Without that coincidence, the USA would probably have dropped A-bombs on Tokyo and every other large Japanese city, and invaded mainland Japan causing millions of casualties on both sides.

Perhaps history after all, is just a series of unfortunate, or fortunate, coincidences? Nothing pre-planned or pre-destined about it at all? Just the usual chaos?

Another of my favourite "coincidences" that I discovered quite by accident some years ago relates to two very famous and brilliant authors who are still household names today, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories and HG Wells (War of the Worlds etc). Did you know that for a period, before either of them had created their famous characters, that they practically lived next door to each other?

Doyle was a struggling GP and the younger Wells a very unhappy drapers assistant with a consuming interest in science. As was common in late Victorian times there was a local Scientific and Literary Society at which Doyle is known to have been a speaker. Is it too much to speculate that the two men may have met and inspired each other?

Which brings me in a convoluted fashion to confess that Chapter 8 is now complete and Chapter 9 has begun to take shape, and by of course, pure coincidence, the news today reveals that the real police force which operates in the area in which my story is set, are being exposed by the BBC for their serious shortcomings in a number of actual murder investigations, in one of which, a serving police officer was actually a suspect!

Sometimes, do you get the feeling that you can actually hear the cogs of coincidence clicking?