For approximately a year and a half during the mid to late nineties, I worked as a chef in a hotel in a small town quite the way away from my actual hometown. I took out a flat and it was nice to get away, be somewhere else, among people I had previously not come across or known anything about. It was nice to move at a slower pace than what I had been used to and all these things added up to become food for the soul.

About a fifteen-minute walk or so from the town I had come to be in, depending on how quick you walk, there is a pitch and putt golf course I used to go to every once in a while. I wasn't a great player or anything like that, but it was a good place to go to, chill out and knock about a golf ball for an hour or two, especially on days where the weather was nice. Again, more food for the soul.

There were times during my eighteen month stay when while I was out walking, I would head towards the golf course and just keep on going for a few more minutes until I came to a little wooded area and then I would continue to walk up a hill and go past the numerous trees until I came to this very old well. It was a nice peaceful place to take a walk to, a really nice place to come to and relax.

Back during that period in time, I used to like to think that if you came to this well with a wish and you wished hard enough and long enough then maybe your wish would or could come true. And do you know what? Well ... perhaps I'll just come right out and tell you.

If history past, present, and future were to remain constant then I am not or at least was not meant to meet my friend Fred until la the in the month of April 2008 but instead I met him in September 2006 and I met him before he was to meet me. This might throw you a bit ... there is a reason for that.

During the last two weeks of July 2006, I had been on holidays in Puerto Rico in Gran Canaria. I have a thing for podiums especially when I'd have had a few drinks on me. That being said ... one night in particular, after having had a fair few drinks, I tried to jump onto a wooden podium which was about a foot or so high and as I was doing so, I lost my footing. My right foot landed on the podium and my left leg banged against the side of this podium.

I didn't think much more about it until I had got back home to where I live, for at the time I met the podium there had been nothing more than a slight nick and there indeed had been drink too, but unfortunately by the time I returned from hols, the damage had been done.

A splinter had gone into my leg and a little hole developed in my left shin right where I had banged it. An infection in my leg had been eating its way out from inside my leg and this created the hole. The strange thing was that it didn't hurt so I assumed that this would simply heal by itself, but the hole was getting larger. I had let five weeks pass before I went to get it checked out. I had to spend ten days in hospital getting treatment and that is where I met Fred.

Fred had been in a strange, well accident if you can call it an accident. He was out his back garden when something fell from the sky into his shed causing damage to the shed and to Fred as he had been in the shed at the time. Fred's left leg received the worst of the multiple injuries that had come his way. So, in September 2006, we were both in two different rooms on the same general ward in the hospital of my hometown.

During the second day of my stay in hospital, a man was passing by my room. There was a total of eight patients in my room with indeed myself being one, and as this man looked in, he took a look at each of us individually. When he looked my way, it appeared to me that he recognized me. I didn't know him, but he called me by my name, grabbed my right hand and shook it before hugging me as if we were two close friends who had not seen each other in a while.

'Sorry, do I know you?' was all I could manage to ask.

He apologized before proceeding in telling me that his name was Fred, and he went on to tell me the strangest things. He said that we were or are indeed best friends. Apparently, I was his best man at his wedding. He continued to tell me that he had been married to a lady named Jane for twenty-five years. She had lost her battle with cancer soon after their twenty fifth wedding anniversary.

Fred told me he couldn't carry on without Jane. She was his everything and he simply could not recover from losing her. He was taking her death so much worse than he could have ever anticipated.

Apparently, every day for two weeks Fred had made his way up to that wishing well, the one that I used to go to, and he would make a wish, the same wish for each of those fourteen days until something strange was to occur, for on that fourteenth day at the well, Fred closed his eyes, made his wish and all of a sudden, he found himself at the hospital just moments prior to coming across me.

To me, this guy Fred looked as if he was at least sixty years old. I was thirty-two at this moment in time so obviously there was no way I could have been the best man for anyone when I was just seven years old and if I had been then I'm sure I'd have remembered.

Fred told me, the wish he had wished for had not only brought him to where he now was or is, but it had also taken him back in time. He went on to tell me that we actually don't meet till April 2008 in the hotel I had worked in years before, but I guess that was about to change if it hadn't already. He said that he was looking for his younger self who just so happens to be in the hospital at this very moment.

He had originally met the woman who would become his wife, in the hallway just outside my hospital room. He was in a wheelchair waiting to move into his bed, he had his surgery and was to spend the rest of his recuperative time in hospital in my ward, a few rooms down. As he waited in the hallway, Jane, who was a nurse at the hospital from another ward, would accidentally walk into a medication trolley and crash into Fred and that's how they were to meet.

Fred asked me the time, I told him what it was and with that he said he had to go. I got up out of my bed, grabbed my intravenous drip and went after him, because of my own leg, I was a bit slow but there was a man in a wheelchair in the hallway, a medicine trolley near him and a nurse on the other side with her back turned.

The man I had been talking to, walked down the hall and moved the trolley. With that, the nurse turned around, and she surely would have walked into that trolley, but Fred had moved it. As she passed by me and I could see her name badge, it read 'Jane'. Fred continued walking down the hall. He turned, looked at the man in the wheelchair, then looked at me, smiled and disappeared. So, I guess he changed history or at least, his history.

I got talking to young Fred over the time I spent in hospital. I got out first but ended up having to spend another six days in hospital a couple of weeks later as a cyst developed on my leg. The hole that I had had, closed so anything unsavoury that needed to come out developed into that cyst. Unfortunately, when this lump on my leg first began to appear I was told it was nothing to worry about, though a time came when this 'lump' would burst. The hole may not have been sore, but this bursting cyst was, so I had it lanced and was back in hospital.

Before Fred left the hospital, he had been sitting on a bench just outside the main hospital doors and guess who just happened to sit next to him? ... Jane. Jane was waiting on a lift home so while she waited, she had a conversation with Fred. Her lift arrived and they said their goodbyes.

Since Fred and I had become friends, earlier than we were supposed to, (not that he knew any different), he came to visit me during my second stay in hospital. So, I guess it is sort of my fault rather than the intervention of fate that Fred and Jane get together as before Fred left having come visiting me, he saw Jane.

He had told me that he couldn't stop thinking about this nurse he had been chatting to while sitting on a bench. Before he would make his own way home on this occasion, he decided to invite Jane out. Perhaps there was something more to chance about all this and perhaps both Fred and Jane were feeling that too, as Jane seemed more than happy to accept the incoming invite. Thing was that Fred had not been her patient so there would be no ethical reason for her to decline.

So indeed, was any of this ... fate? Were they just always meant to meet? Or was it my involvement, talking to older Fred creating reason for their second coming together? Had I unknowingly brought them together? Thing was, since old Fred changed the past, would I ever have met Fred again after either his or my dismissal from hospital? Well, older Fred did say I was his best man.

Anyway, Fred and Jane are now engaged and guess what? Fred has asked me to be his best man. Crazy huh? So, if the future still holds a cancer that will end Jane's life, should I warn them? Would they believe me at all if I did warn them? And why hasn't old Fred come back again if Jane is to die of cancer?

Last week both Fred and Jane came up to that little town I once worked in. It was a trip the three of us took together. I brought them to the wishing well and told them that if there is or ever is to be a wish they'll have or want and if they wish hard enough and long enough then maybe that wish just may actually come true.