Sandi Toksvig ponders the extraordinary connection of things I have been writing this column for nearly seven years, during which time everything from cheerleading injuries to the accidental defenestration of kings has managed to come up. It is a tribute to the world's endless wonder that I continue to be amazed at the way in which seemingly disparate pieces of information connect together. How the "six degrees of separation" notion - that "everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on earth" - often connects not only people but events past and present in surprising ways. I like these connections. They help order the confusion of existence and they make me smile. I went to see someone I've known for 35 years the other day. Old friends are a marvellous invention. The good ones are like a great handmade sweater that never ceases to warm you and somehow always fits. Occasionally you find you've left it in a drawer for too long and pull it out with a grin of delight. My friend Kriss is such a chum. He is also the chief electrician at my favourite building of all time, The Palace Theatre in London. The theatre opened as the "Royal English Opera House" in January 1891 and it was here, this month in 1909, that the general public first saw colour motion pictures. It was also the place where, in 1976, I got my first theatrical job working with Kriss as a member of the electrics crew. I was researching something else entirely (early entertainment and the invention of the machine gun - two items not often connected), when I was drawn back to the Palace. I had discovered that it was today in 1453 that John French gave his mother the "inn, with its appurtenances, called Savage's Lin, otherwise called the Bell on the Hoop, in the parish of St. Bridget, in Fleet-street, London." The long-gone pub on Ludgate Hill is a legendary part of theatre history for it became the Bell Savage Inn. It was a place not just famous for refreshment but for the role it played in Elizabethan drama. It was here between 1576 and 1594 that as many as 500 people would gather in the galleries surrounding the inn's central courtyard and watch plays, including some early Shakespeare. I like pubs perhaps because their keeping runs like a thread through my maternal line. My great-great-grandparents, James Fisher and his wife Eliza Jane Windsor, pulled pints at The Greyhound in Guildford, Surrey, while my great-grandfather, Field John Jackson Trickett, was the publican at The Fox in Lower Kingswood. Before he took on The Fox, Field (so named because of confusion during his baptism at St Martin-in-the-Fields) was an engineer. His principal interest was electricity, at a time when the only way to power it was with a gas or coal engine, and he tinkered away at this in his workshop in West Norwood in south London. In 1881 Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, an American inventor, emigrated to Britain and settled in West Norwood. He needed a workshop and went to work at my great-grandfather's, where he developed the Maxim gun, the first portable, fully automatic machine gun. Whenever Hiram wanted to test the thing, he thoughtfully warned his neighbours by placing announcements in the local paper. I like to think of great-grandfather standing with his fingers in his ears while Sir Hiram blasted away. Maxim also created the "Captive Flying Machine," an amusement ride which still thrills holidaymakers at Blackpool. What I then discovered is that it was built by Field Trickett. That Field loved entertainment and was the man who engineered the first electric lights in London theatres. Indeed it is almost certain that he was the engineer who first lit the stage at the Palace. I never met him, but what are the chances that I should get a job working the lights and then fall head over heels in love with the very building where, unbeknown to me, my great-grandfather once made the stars shine? Sir Hiram was born today in 1840, yet somehow I feel he connects with Mrs French receiving her theatrical pub on the same day 387 years earlier. My great-grandfather might have sat in his pub and talked of them both. Kriss took me down into the bowels of the theatre where the coal-fired generators once stood. We didn't need to say anything. We just smiled. Follow SEVEN on Twitter: @TelegraphSeven