2 Tina Turners & the Hand of God

I was at work the other day, plinking away at my keyboard and staring listlessly into my screen like a post-lobotomy MacMurphy, when a Tina Turner song came on the radio. Nothing terribly remarkable about a Tina Turner song coming on the radio, I’m sure you’ll agree, unless you happen to live in some alternate universe in which the state has declared the playing of Tina Turner’s music a crime punishable by death. I don’t know why Tina Turner’s greatest hits would be so drastically proscribed in this or any other universe, but I do know that I’ve just come up with a cracking premise for a marginally-successful straight-to-video movie, which I’ll probably call ‘Tina Turner’s Totalitarian Terror’.

 

Anyway, seconds after Tina Turner had growled huskily from the radio, an email notification popped up in the bottom-right corner of my screen. It was a communication from a lady in our vast group of interconnected companies whose existence, up until that point, had been unknown to me, and whose name I’ll never now forget. That’s because her name was Christina Turner. Again, nothing terribly remarkable about that on its own, but put the two Tina Turner-related sensory assaults together and you’ve got something quite remarkable, if only in the sense that I’ve just remarked upon it.

 

Tina Turner in the ears; Christina Turner in the eyes. My brain spasmed, temporarily overloaded and unable to cope with this Tina Turner-mageddon. I half expected to look down to find a woman with gigantic hair vigorously fist-pumping my cock, while looking me in the eyes and shouting: ‘You’re not having a stroke. EVERYTHING’S Tina Turner now, you SON OF A BITCH!!’

 

The odds against these two events coinciding are precisely fifty-six squillion gazilli-jillions times infinity to one. Trust me, I’m a maths guy. That can mean only one thing: this was no coincidence. Fate was clearly sending me an important message through the medium of a frizzy-haired pensioner with a compromised hip. But what was fate trying to tell me? I mulled it over. Of course! The function of the first Tina Turner was to draw attention to the second. Because the second Tina Turner was clearly in terrible danger.

 

I cracked my fingers, held them poised over the keyboard like some heroic concert pianist, and set about sending what would surely be the most important email of Christina Turner’s life:

 


‘Hello Christina Turner,

 

You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Now that the introductions are out of the way, I need you to listen to me very carefully, but, you know, listen to me with your eyes. Today I received a message from Tina Turner. Sounds great doesn’t it? No, Christina. It’s not great.

 

It’s bloody awful.

 

You’re in terrible danger. We’re talking ‘strange man in a wet-suit clutching a sharpened parrot skull standing at the foot of your bed when you wake up at 3am for a piss’ terrible danger. We’re talking ‘the sharpened parrot-skull opens its hellish maw and says “Christina Turner, you’re in terrible danger,”’ kind of terrible danger.

 

I know what you’re thinking: this guy’s crazy. How would he even be able to contact Tina Turner? I’m ready to make you swallow your doubt, Christina, because Tina Turner spoke to me through the radio. Now do you believe me, you stupid bitch?

 

I’ve got to ask: you don’t happen to live anywhere near a place called ‘Nutbush’ do you? Do yourself a favour and stay away from the city limits; in fact until I can fully analyse Tina’s message, you so much as see a hungry squirrel in a hedge, you run like fuck, girl.

 

Chin up, Christina Turner. We’ll get through this together. Always remember that you’re ‘simply the best’.

 

PS: Better than all the rest.


A few minutes later my phone rang. It was Christina Turner, in tears, in hysterics no less, telling me that she was terrified and had phoned the police. I’d never felt more relief. Thanks for listening, girl.

 

But as Christina Turner sobbed and sobbed, a sudden panic seized the smile from my face and set my heart a-palpatating. Yes, one Tina Turner was there to draw attention to the other. But what if I’d got my Tina Turners mixed up? What if the Tina Turner in danger wasn’t Tina Turner, but TINA TURNER? The famous one? Of course. After all, why would fate go to all that trouble to intercede on behalf of a prole?

 

JESUS CHRIST, TINA TURNER WAS IN TROUBLE!

 

Dear The Tina Turner Fan Club

 

At this very moment you hold Tina Turner’s life in your hands. She is in grave danger. I should know, because I got an email from somebody who is essentially called Tina Turner at the same time as a Tina Turner song came on the radio. OK, so the radio station we’re tuned to plays at least nine Tina Turner songs a day, but who made you an expert at divining fate? Do you want Tina Turner to die? Well, do you? Who are you going to be a fan of then? DIANA ROSS? Fuck off.

 

Please just warn her. Even though she probably doesn’t have that long left, it would be a shame to see her gutted like a fish/squashed by a falling safe/succumbing to painful flatulence as a result of too much dairy in her diet.

 

PS: I’m making a film called ‘Tina Turner’s Totalitarian Terror’. I was thinking of casting Burt Ward as Tina, you know, to generate a bit of left-field buzz. Ask her what she thinks.


If you have ever believed yourself psychic, or in tune with fate or the heavens, if a person about whom you’ve just been thinking contacts you that very same minute, hour or day, then you’re probably just as crazy as the alternate version of Jamie Andrew who actually did send those emails to Christina and Tina Turner.

 

The coincidence actually happened, but my point is that coincidences always do. We choose to imbue coincidences with an air of relevance or destiny because a) that’s how our brains have evolved, and our travel, technologies and societies have evolved too quickly for the old grey matter to catch up, and/or b) we’re ridiculous, shart-brained narcissists.

 

My Tina/Christina Turner coincidence was just that. It would be ridiculous to think that there was some greater meaning or message behind it all, but for some reason hundreds of millions of people all around the world tend to interpret the world’s hundreds of millions of more conventional, non-Tina-Turner-related coincidences as evidence of God’s hand in the mix. So what do you think now? That God, or fate or who-or-what-ever you think linked those Tina Turners together in order to inspire me to write a blog post about how coincidences are just coincidences and not incidences of fate, so that…?

 

Oh.

 

Oh my.

 

Well played, fate.

 

You’ve danced privately for me. You’ve unsteamed my windows.

 

I guess that’s a ‘fate accompli’.