David Prashker's Book Of Days: November 28

1628, 1757

I wrote, on Nov 26, about the amazing coincidence that more than one coincidence often takes place, quite by chance though also and quite clearly arranged by the powers that be in the Palace of Random Haphazardness, at completely different places which, if you try hard enough, you can connect, on days that happen to be the same one, albeit centuries apart. And no sooner did I do so than, amazingly, three people whose last name just happens to be Fate, albeit in different languages (Suzanne Qadar, Marianne Sudba and Nancy Mingyun, though I notice that they are all significant names in the life and work of Leonard Cohen, and a Nancy, by further coincidence, is about to take her own place, on this very page of this very blog - see below) all emailed me to say, in exactly the same words: "wait till you get to November 28th".

And here I am, and here, obstinate but pliable beside me on the page, is that worldly wiseman John Bunyan, English cleric and author (it occurs to me that the same was true of Laurence Sterne a couple of days ago - how many British writers of the Georgian-Victorian period, and earlier thinking of John Donne, were clerics - Swift of course, and Harvard, on Nov 26, was one too: how strange! what a coincidence! And why is it so, and not really a coincidence at all? Because all they studied in the universities back then was Classics and Theology, minimal science, nothing else, so if you wanted an intellectual life you did Divinity - think of George Eliot's Casaubon as well...), where was I... yes, Mr Legality John Bunyan with his watchful shining ones and his prudence and his piety, born today in 1628; and where is he now, but buried in the graveyard of John Wesley's Church on London's Old Street, Bunhill Fields to name it correctly, the "dissenters' graveyard" just outside the Barbican of the city wall.

And then, a hundred and twenty-nine years later, today in 1757, another of England's great penmen, William Blake, was born. And where is he now, but buried in the graveyard of... John Wesley's Church on Old Street, in Bone Hill Fields to name it absolutely correctly...

And sheer serendipity, unsynchronised providence at work again, Daniel Defoe (the De was his addition, to make the name sound more posh) is also buried there, as is George Fox, who founded the Quaker Society of Friends.

Amber pages:

Giovanni Battista Lulli, musician and composer, born today in 1632 , in Florence; he later became a French citizen and is now known as Jean Baptiste Lully; he is buried in the Basilica of Notre-Dame-des-Victoires, in Paris

And another whose name depends entirely on the language in which you are naming him: Ferdinand Magellan in English, Fernäo de Megalhäe in his native Portuguese, Fernando de Magallanes in the Spanish of his then employers, when his ship the Trinidad, accompanied by four other ships -the San Antonio (returned to Spain shortly afterwards), the Concepción (scuttled and burned in 1521), the Victoria (the only one to complete the circumnavigation - see Sept 8 and Sept 20), and the Santiago (lost in a storm) - became the first known ship of Europe to enter the Pacific Ocean, today in 1520...

and what a shame that I can't add here the amazing coincidence that, exactly one hundred years later, George Fox and his fellow Quakers, aboard the good ship Mayflower, entered Provincetown Harbour at the tip of Cape Cod, and signed the Mayflower Covenant... but alas that happened on November 21 1620, not November 28.

However Friedrich Engels, communist theoretician, was born today in 1820 ... and there I was, just finished the Magellan paragraph above, enjoying a slow stroll across Primrose Hill from St John's Wood to meet my daughter for lunch in her flat in Chalk Farm, when high up on a wall there was a plaque... 122 Regents Park Road to be absolutely precise...

And finally, and it seems so long ago since I first mentioned her, today in 1919, the first female member, ever, of the British Parliament, Nancy Witcher Langhorne, Lady Astor, upset the alpha males terribly by taking her seat. I haven't looked up where she is buried, but she had the most gorgeous house in London, in St James' Square, now used by the In & Out Club, an élite private club for naval and military people; and I mention it only because this blog-page seems to have become a burial-ground, and it just so happens that there is a little park in St James' Square, and on the railing, right in front of the Astor house, there is a permanent memorial, and people are always putting flowers there, a tribute to Yvonne Fletcher, the policewoman who was murdered for no obvious reason, by a shot fired from the Libyan embassy, by a gunman who it should have been dead easy to identify, but never was.