I don’t believe premonition or anything like that, but I thought that the following is rather odd.
My wife and daughters are on holiday in Turkey, having booked their own flights and accommodation. The flights were through a company called XL Leisure.
In the early hours of Friday morning, I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I tried for a short while, but then decided it was hopeless and that I might as well get up. Normally in that situation I would read a book or listen to some music, but on that occasion I had a strong desire to watch the 24-hour news. This is unusual for me, because had I wanted to watch television in the middle of the night, it would be much more likely to see a film or something light.
I switched on the TV to the 24-hour news channel, and within minutes on the scrolling news bar at the bottom of the screen, I saw the announcement that XL Leisure had gone into administration. This was at about five o’clock in the morning. XL Leisure is the third biggest holiday company in the UK, and I knew very quickly that tens of thousands of people would be looking for flights to get themselves home. So I went online and was lucky enough to find cheap flights (£129) departing from Turkey at the same time as the original XL booking. Within a short time the only flights available were in the £800-£1000 range, and shortly after that, there were no flights available at all.
If I hadn’t woken up when I did, and if I hadn’t decided to watch the news channel, I wouldn’t have known of the situation and been able to get the tickets for my family to return home. Spooky, eh?