I met my wife-to-be in the spring of 2000. We were married later that same year, in the autumn, so things moved fairly quickly. Somewhere in between, she came to meet me. Maybe it was a date, maybe we were just hanging out. I can't remember the exact circumstances now. What I do remember is that she turned up wearing a T-shirt that caused my brain to temporarily stop functioning.
The T-shirt had a UFO on it.
Not just any UFO. My UFO.
A few years earlier, I'd drawn this slightly wonky flying saucer in Adobe Illustrator for the back of the first Club Alien flyer. I knew it was mine immediately because, to be perfectly blunt, it is a little bit rubbish ;-)
So there I was, looking at the woman I was shortly going to marry, wearing a T-shirt featuring a piece of artwork I had drawn years earlier, on a flyer, for a club night.
I had absolutely no idea this T-shirt existed.
I think my response was something along the lines of:
“What... how... I don't understand... !?!?!”
And I genuinely think it took me a few seconds to work out what I was actually looking at. My brain was trying to process several incompatible pieces of information at the same time. I knew the image. I knew exactly where it came from. But I had never seen it on a T-shirt, and I certainly wasn't expecting it to appear on the person I had only recently started seeing.
My best guess is that Jez must have been friendly with Cyberdog and at some point either gave them or sold them the design from the flyer to use on a shirt. That part of the story happened entirely without me knowing anything about it.
Then, years later, completely independently, the woman who would become my wife somehow bought one.
There are coincidences, and then there are coincidences that make reality feel briefly broken. This was definitely the second kind. Of all the T-shirts she could have owned, she somehow had one featuring a drawing I'd made years before we met, without either of us having any idea there was a connection.
Very, very, very strange. And I still have absolutely no idea what the odds of that are.