Nine Lives and Counting

Raised in the 1960s in a tough corner of the Scottish Lowlands, Randalph Bland had already learned how to duck and dive on the mean streets before, still in his teens, he set off to see the world. Over the decades that followed, working in 20 different countries, he would try his hand as a construction worker, humanitarian worker, civil engineer, business consultant, head-hunter, translator, management coach, and finally as a diplomat. This first volume relates his adventures up to the age of 27, by when he had fallen in love with Nepal before finding himself sentenced to death in south-east Asia, clearing up dead bodies in a bloody massacre in Beirut, escaping a military invasion by the skin of his teeth in Sudan, being robbed at gunpoint in India, and watching (having just missed the flight) as an aircraft carrying his comrades was blasted out of the sky in front of him in war-torn Angola.

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