Serendipity

Back in 2003 I learned myself html by reading the html 4 for the worldwide web, a visual quickstart guide from Elizabeth Castro and then wrote my first website. Castro is an American tech writer who wrote numerous books about certain aspects of website development. She is also active in the Catalan independence movement. After a long pause I started dabbling in website development again and decided yesterday to speed read this old book again. In her book she uses various html code snippets to illustrate the function of tags and their properties and so on. The content of the example pages deal with Barcelona and Catalonia. In one example she introduces Pau Casals as a famous Catalan Cello player from the past. I had never heard of Pau Casals but then this morning I heard on the radio that this year the winner of this year’s Queen Elisabeth Competition (finals are ongoing this week) will be allowed a 4 year loan of Pau Casals’ famous cello. So by sheer coïncidence I picked up an old out of print book and came across a famous cellist I had never hear of and then heard him being mentioned on the radio because the loan of his cello is the prize of a music competition that is currently ongoing. A perfect example of serendipity 😀