Welshman's bizarre adventures from Merthyr to Mecca
This week sees the publication of In Passing: A Welshman’s bizarre adventures from Merthyr to
The unusual collection of offbeat anecdotes are a collection of just some of the strange incidents which have happened to him over a period of 65 years, and over several continents:
“ I am lucky to have done an awful lot of travelling, including with the Spanish Foreign Legion in the colony of Spanish Sahara, being surprised by several nasty earthquakes, and being in East Germany as they built the wall, but my stories are in the shadow of the world affairs rather than dealing with them directly,” says Randall Baker.
The incidents recorded in In Passing are all true stories from his own life, starting from
when he was a pupil at
“Throughout my life, when I discussed something that had
just happened to me, inevitably I was greeted by cries of “Oh, come on” and the like. Eventually, my wife
started to preface them with “Here comes another of Randall’s stories”. The hard thing for me was that
I was just recounting something that had really just happened.
Eventually I realised that life is not like this for everyone and so for
posterity, I decided to put all the most interesting or amusing events
together, starting with post-war
He credits his childhood in Merthyr as ‘a good training ground’, enabling him to go out and face some of the wilder corners of the world.
“Merthyr’s history in the iron and steel
Crimebusting soothsayers, a homicidal optometrist, men who
fall off trains or into open graves, a ridiculously over-attentive waitress, an
abandoned stripper and a fellow traveller whose huge suitcase is packed solely
with alcohol are just a few of the colourful characters populating this
engaging book, The stories get more and more inexplicable, though all are true!
He comes across coffee with strange properties, gets caught in the crossfire in
the OK Corral of English tearooms, locates lost property through the power of
suggestion, meets royalty and rebels, and POSSIBLY steps back in time into 1944