Nine Lives and Counting

NINE LIVES & COUNTING is the true story of Scottish-born author Randalph Bland’s younger years, growing up in a harsh, bigoted environment and an angry home in the post-war depression and resentment of industrial Scotland in the 1960s and 70s. 

To escape the omnipresent fear of violence, bullying, and oppression, in Part 1 (Anything for a laugh), young Randalph discovers a way out through raucous borderline humour, often at the expense of others, which helps him to forget the stark realities of his daily life.

Randalph’s existential need to escape the straitjacket of home persists into his late teens and early twenties in Part 2 (Out of the nest), when he struggles to survive as a non-conformist, rebellious student in a system he loathes, indulging in ever-more-daring dark humour to hide his pain.

But in Part 3 (The fun’s over) life is waiting for him and traps him in a dark and threatening corner, from where there is no escape, no humour, no hope. As if to demand a reconning for his reckless youth, Randalph, now a young man in his twenties, finds himself face to face with death, the horrors of war and the crippling fear that grips you when you’re not sure you’re going to see another day.

In an uncanny series of narrow escapes in front-line humanitarian jobs in the midst of civil wars and refugee disasters around the world, Randalph learns the hard way that there’s no escape from the realities of life. No matter where you run to, life will bring you to the realisation that life is not a joke…

Sentenced to death during the Vietnamese Boat People crisis, in charge of cleaning up two bloody massacres at the height of the Lebanese Civil War, escaping from an advancing army during the Ugandan refugee crisis in South Sudan, robbed at gunpoint and abducted in India, surviving an uncanny series of aviation incidents during the Angolan Civil War, where he sees his team blown out of the sky by a missile, Randalph Bland’s powerful descriptions of his close calls with death will rivet you to your seat as the tension and the danger build to a spine-chilling ending that will challenge your imagination.