Despite working full-time and all over the clock in rolling news, I was away for both the death of John Paul II and that of Charles Haughey, which from an Irish media standpoint were the stories of 2005 and 2006 respectively. (An aside: Agence France Presse always refers to the Haughey era as 'corruption-tainted premierships' - a catch-all phrase that rings so vaguely it would fit Mugabe equally as well, indeed it probably has.)
In the case of Haughey, I was halfway up the side of Sydney's Harbour Bridge (right) telling an older couple all about how the media had been planning for this event for at least the previous 18 months, and I had managed to circumvent a tonne of boring extra work. They thought this attitude was great!
Yet I must be improving, given that I dedicated two months' work to a special election website last year, and tapped up plenty on the recent coffee-starved morning of Bertie's bowing out that is already the story of 2008.
There's a flipside to this coincidence coin too, in that I have stayed at home when bad things happen in other parts. To start, I was questioned by Tim over a pint in O'Sheas [Clonskeagh] in November '03 about why I hadn't taken any city breaks despite saying that I would once I had a decent salary. I replied by saying I was looking into a solo trip to Istanbul. The next day, truck bombs killed dozens of people in the city in Turkey's biggest ever suicide attack. The following Spring, I had half-made plans with Ollie to visit Madrid in the same month as the train bombings.
I can think of a few other not-so-near misses, like London being first on my list for a trip in 2005, though I didn't have a specific date in mind and ended up going some months after the 7 July attacks.
But ultimately it's a fast move in my world from the thought of an apparent connection to the realisation that, for better or worse, it was simply random. And I'm sure the foregoing says as much about my newsjunkie tendencies as it does about coincidence!
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