So here’s an odd thing.

On Monday, I cycled home as normal, and coming round the corner onto our road I saw our car parked outside our house (about 20m away). Immediately I thought “I’d better check if that’s locked.”

Initially I had no idea where that thought came from. Now, looking back at it, here’s what I knew/inferred:

  • Fact: Laura had recently been out in the car, with Anna (3 month old baby), and had got back about 15 mins previously
  • Fact: Anna had been hungry in the car. I inferred that she was probably crying, and Laura would have been in a rush to get in the house
  • Fact: The car was parked the opposite way to the way Laura would have come home, so she’d have taken extra time turning it round in the road before parking
  • Inference: It’s therefore possible that in the rush to get in and feed Anna, Laura would have forgotten to lock the car.

Here’s what actually happened, as I found out later:

  • Anna had calmed down by the time Laura had actually parked, and there was no rush to get in. This is partly why she had time to turn the car round.
  • Laura swears she’d locked the car: she remembers pressing the button on her remote key.

However, before I went into the house, I checked the car and found all the doors were unlocked. I’ve never before, in many years, ever thought to check the car. Moreover, apart from when we first got it (and I didn’t know some intricacies of the locking system), neither Laura nor I have found it unlocked when going out to drive it. So the chances of it being unlocked and me thinking to check are astronomically small.

What must have happened is that Laura accidentally pressed the key twice, or pressed the wrong button. But that isn’t really related to any of my inferences above, since most of my inferences were wrong anyway.

Now, I wouldn’t necessarily think much of this, but it reminded me of an incident in my childhood. I was about 10, and some friends and I were playing “spies” in the street when for some reason a friend said “we need to break into an enemy car.” No malice or intention to break in, just playing. I said “I think it’s that one up there,” pointing to a car about 40m away. When we got to the car, it was unlocked. The only unlocked one in the street. We’d never previously, nor did again, play at breaking into cars.

Another time, on the same street, something caught my attention in that build-up of soil you get at the bottom of a wall. It was a key, old and dirty and had probably been there a while. The key had no markings or branding on it. On a whim, I tried it in my dad’s car. It opened it. My dad had never owned the key, and indeed I’d hardly ever used his car keys so I didn’t really know what shape his keys had. We never did work out the mystery key’s provenance. I’d never before, nor did again, find anything resembling a car key on the street.

So… do I have some kind of eerie affinity with car locking mechanisms? Am I car-lock psychic? Answers below! And don’t say “confirmation bias”: like most people I rarely have any opportunity to engage with car locks above the level of unlocking my own car, so it’s not like these are three memorable incidents out of hundreds of uneventful ones.

EDIT: I don’t for a second believe I’m psychic. But I do think that sceptics should practice arguing against anecdote, and learn from each others’ arguing skills. So get cracking in the comments… personally I don’t even know where to begin with this one.