Worlds Weirdest Coincidence

So here's how it works. I live with my parents. It's a fairly big house, three bedrooms, three bathrooms (Originally two and one, but my Dad is addicted to extensions) and as of recent events, my thirty-something brother is living with us. This is all well and good, seeing as I never really grew up with my brother and I really enjoy being with him, but there's a catch.

There's always a catch.


Two days a week, normally Friday and Saturday, the kids come.


There's two of them, Finley: Born 2003, now seven years old, a four-eyed bookworm who during his first year or two everyone thought was a clone of me at that age, and Lola: Born 2007, now four, the noisiest little girl you'll ever meet with the funniest array of faces you'll ever see.

Now my book collection, in it's current state, is in three sections:
1. The books I don't want any-more and am selling to make space for new books.
2. The overflow of books (Mainly ones I haven't read for years) outside my room on the landing.
3. My actual bookshelf, which I'm in the process of cleaning and re-arranging.
I, like most people, happen to have a couple of editions of the Guinness Book of World Records, bought for me as desperate attempts at Christmas presents by distant relatives, that I've flicked through, laughed at, and then condemned to the shelf.

So when I woke up this morning to find the kids clawing through my overflow of books, I didn't mind them sitting there and pawing through the World Records books, except for the fact that for the rest of the morning, all I could hear was the Lords name in vain as they sighted the extremes of life itself.

But it's not what they saw, or the pictures in the book that struck me, it's something that took me a few minutes to realise. I've only got two editions of the record books, one from 2003, and one from 2007. One from the year Finley was born, which he was reading, and one from the year Lola was born, which she was reading.

And that was really weird.

Try as I might to wax lyrical about some far-out metaphor completely made up to tie this all together, I really can't. I just thought it was really quite peculiar.

-Lewis