The KUUincidental Case of the Three-Legged Greyhound
By Howard Male
October 2022
Calling all coincidence connoisseurs—Howard Male has another barking contribution to our ongoing series of unlikely KUUincidences…
It’s the late 1990s. My friends are visiting: Dave from Tokyo and Claire from Cardiff. The past really was another country back then – no internet, and therefore no YouTube – and we’re catching up on TV shows Dave has missed since his last trip to the UK, on VHS tapes.
All three of us are already fans of the synchronistic game-play of the Knowing Unknowable Universe (KUU), so there’s an atmosphere of high yet non-specific expectation as we settle down to watch illusionist Derren Brown show off his ‘magic’ at a greyhound stadium.
Derren persuades an experienced punter to place a bet on the dog he thinks least likely to win: then he can use his mind-control skills to get the man his winnings, regardless of the fact the dog has come in last.
CLAIRE (stoned): "How do they know which greyhound is least likely to win??"
ME (stoned): "It'll be the three-legged one!"
DAVE (stoned): "Or the fat one!"
How we laughed.
Derren’s show ends, and I feed the video machine a tape of The League of Gentlemen. A few minutes in, there’s a flurry of chaotic activity as sinister circus master Papa Lazarou forces open the front door of a suburban home, then runs up the stairs with his wife and some kind of dog. "That was a three-legged greyhound!” Claire exclaims. “I’m sure it was!"
I rewind the tape so we can watch the blurry few seconds again. The image of the alleged greyhound is so fleeting I have to run through it one frame at a time. But there’s no doubt. It is definitely a greyhound. And where that all-important fourth leg should be, is only a stump.
*
Only a few days before Dave and Claire’s visit, I’d gone out to purchase Lisa Left Eye's only solo album, at an HMV sale.
After they left, I played the CD for the first time. One track contained lyrics about ‘a three-legged rover’, accompanied by barking in the background. I wondered – I still do – how many songs in the whole history of popular music mention three-legged dogs. When I emailed Claire to inform her of this third appearance of a three-legged dog, she jokingly replied that as we’d now experienced this animal imagined in the form of a joke, heard as the subject of a song, and, apparently, seen as a ‘character’ on TV, all we now needed to complete the cycle was to come across an actual three-dimensional three-legged greyhound.
It took a while. A few months in fact. But early one Saturday morning I got a call from a very excited Claire. At the time she owned a button shop in Cardiff city centre. One of her young shop assistants often came up with elaborate excuses as to why she couldn’t make it into work. But that morning’s story was her best yet.
A lost dog had, allegedly, appeared in the middle of the road outside her house, and she felt morally obliged to take the poor thing to the police station. My first thought was that it was Claire’s own hyperactive Jack Russell that had somehow escaped and ended up on the doorstep of her shop assistant (which in itself would still have qualified as somewhat remarkable). But no; it was – of course – a three-legged greyhound. "Get a photo of it!" I commanded, as though our lives depended on it. And she did.
*
Because, as they say, you can’t make this stuff up, a few years later I gifted this anecdote along with other true stories of remarkable coincidence to various characters in my KUUincidence-rich novel Etc Etc Amen. One of my very first readers, a Scottish friend named June, was still immersed in the book when she sent me the following urgent message by email:
'Howard! You are NOT going to believe this one (I'm still laughing and I've been back in the house ten minutes) ... I popped out to our local supermarket for something I knew I'd need in the morning - shop closes at ten and there's rarely anyone around at this time - so I grabbed what I needed and headed for the checkout. A young woman was being served, and she had with her .. IN the shop ... a bloody three-legged greyhound!!!!!!!! I kid you not. And dogs aren't even allowed in the bloody shop!! This is a very small town, but I've never clapped eyes on the girl or the 3-legged dog before in my puff and, furthermore, I couldn't explain to the checkout woman why I was laughing like a lunatic.'
As I have previously outlined, one of the criteria for a legitimate KUUincidence is that the crucial element be highly unusual. What I didn’t say was that, among other things, this rareness can be measured by how often the seemingly ‘unusual’ key ingredient subsequently pops up in one’s life.
Over the two-and-a-bit decades since these events transpired I have acquired the habit, in any instance of a passing greyhound, of checking to make sure all four legs were present and correct. They always have been.
