In a universe where anything can happen, most things sooner or later do

'Coincidence?" as an old friend of mine liked to say whenever one of her enemies fell down an open manhole. "I think not."

We have a strange relationship with chance. Ever since the astronomer Fred Hoyle compared the likelihood of life evolving spontaneously to the chances of a tornado assembling a 747 from a junkyard, we've tended to see extreme improbability as a sign that Something Is Messing With Us.

In the case of my friend, of course, that may be the case. But other instances are enough to suggest that in a universe where anything can happen, most things sooner or later do.

• In 1898, a novel called Futility described an "unsinkable" ocean liner called Titan colliding with an iceberg in the North Atlantic on her maiden voyage. Just as in the case of the real-life Titanic, a catastrophic shortage of lifeboats did for Titan's passengers.

• Chris Cleave's first novel, Incendiary, about a terrorist attack on London, was published on 7 July 2005.

• John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, second and third presidents of the United States and lead authors of the Declaration of Independence, both died on 4 July 1826, 50 years to the day after they signed it.

• That other American founding father, Mark Twain, was born on the day Halley's Comet visited in 1835 and died on the day of its return in 1910. He predicted it would see him out.

• The 19th-century King Umberto I of Italy was eating in a restaurant when he noticed the owner was a near-exact physical double. It emerged that both were born on the same day, in the same town, and had married women with the same name. The restaurateur had opened his establishment on the day of Umberto's coronation. Umberto was shot dead on the day he learned the restaurateur had died in a shooting.

• Park ranger Roy Cleveland Sullivan was hit by lightning seven times: in 1942, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974 and 1977. On one occasion the lightning blew his shoe clean off. After the fourth of these strikes he became accustomed enough to having his hair on fire that he took to carrying a can of water around with him. He lived to 71, dying by his own hand after a love affair went wrong.

Sam Leith's novel The Coincidence Engine is published by Bloomsbury at £12.99.

• This article was amended on 5 April 2011. The original referred to Fred Hoyle as a philosopher. This has been corrected.