The Skirrid Mountain Inn dates back to the Norman Conquest, and its bloody past has given rise to some spine-chilling occurrences.
They are linked by a unity of place – the fenlands of Norfolk and Cambridge – and by precise, elegant prose that elevates everyday occurrences into small, perfectly rendered pieces of art.
Liam Fox, Conservative shadow health secretary, said: "We warned the government that their obsession with the waiting list initiative and running the system with no slack for common and predictable occurrences, such as winter flu, would have major ramifications for the health service".
In a place once considered by its residents to be safer than Texas, just a few hours' drive away, murders, carjackings and extortion became everyday occurrences.
By coincidence, a judge in California ruled on September 11th that four fires set by the same arsonist within a couple of hours in four different county courthouses constituted four separate occurrences.
The construction of industrial sites, high-end housing developments, roads, dams and railways is dislocating village life.Protests and ugly confrontations between villagers and the authorities have become almost daily occurrences.
Since 2007, social unrest related to high food prices has occurred in more than 50 countries, with some experiencing multiple occurrences and a high degree of violence.Under current conditions, the effects of high food prices on humanity are largely negative.
Horrendous acts of schoolboy violence, for example, are regular occurrences, but they fade all too quickly from public memory (the killings by Littleton's Trench-Coatt Mafia" were the seventh such incident to have captured the TV cameras in the past 18 months).
But American-based managers were more likely also to trade "event-driven" strategies, based on unexpected occurrences such as takeovers.
RBS took advantage of this, for instance by setting the "confidence interval" (essentially a measure of how much capital should be held against unlikely occurrences) at 96%.
But that suggests that these by-elections were isolated occurrences, which they are not.
