HE LORD SAID, Let there be light. And there was. But there was nothing to look at. He invents people. They get a job in the garden. Things go well for a while until an incident regarding a tree. They are forced to sling their hook, and woman must henceforth bring forth children in sorrow.
The years 4001 BC to AD 1959 pass without incident.
I spend the early part of 1960 in the womb. Happily adrift in the amniotic fluid I decide, initially, I will become a hippo but am told the job is over-subscribed; instead I am offered the lowly position as a writer called Malcolm Pryce. I take it. Following a journey down a dark, mucus-lined tunnel I am ejected into the hands of a nurse wearing a catcher's mitt - to loud cheers - in a pale, green-tiled room in Shrewsbury..
I go to school in Shrewsbury and then, at the age of nine, to Aberystwyth. Later I study beer-drinking at the Universities of Warwick and Freiburg. I find work as a salesman for Monarch Aluminium in the East Midlands. A year elapses before I am summoned to head office. It seems I have more aluminium than when I started and have thus violated a fundamental principle of selling. I am dismissed and have to hand it all back.
I am apprenticed to the legendary London firm of FCO in Marylebone to write those commercial puffs known as advertisements. I am vouchsafed a great secret: some of the greatest advertising concepts are so simple your gran could have written them. I give her the job. Fame and fortune follow.
Pursuant to my duties as a junior copywriter I am arrested in Baker Street for being drunk and disorderly. I spend the night in the cells of Marylebone police station and appear before the Beak the following morning, along with a Glaswegian girl who had been arrested for soliciting on Edgware Road. The Magistrate stared down over half-moon glasses at the streetwalker and the copywriter before him and gave official expression to the relative moral worth of our two professions by fining us equally £25.
I learned from this that my profession was not greatly esteemed by the public.
A change in my affairs. I read accounts of early seafarers which describe how the comely maidens of Tahiti would sell their charms for a ship's nail. I set sail with a ship full of nails. Alas the price has gone up. It is now 50 dollars for 'short time.'
I enlist as a deck hand on a yacht sailing the South Seas. We visit the paradise islands of French Polynesia, Samoa, Tonga and Fiji. It is the stuff dreams are made of. I land barnacled, scurvy and salt-rimed in Fiji. I wander through Thailand and the Philippines before settling in Singapore where I win acclaim for the tourist promotional literature I write for the former headhunting tribes of Borneo. These are actually truly splendid people and the nicest clients I have ever met.
I decide to write a satirical account of the criminal classes of Aberystwyth. The book will be called Aberystwyth Mon Amour and will be very funny.
Once More Before the Mast! Technically there is no mast since this is a refrigerated cargo ship. We are bound for South America to fetch bananas. A real banana boat! I charter a berth and start writing. Aberystwyth Mon Amour is published to great acclaim. I return from South America and sojourn in the Far East. Last Tango in Aberystwyth and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth soon follow.
Much taken with the sunny disposition of the ladies I decide to tarry in the Kingdom of Siam. And there I complete Don't Cry for Me Aberystwyth, which is published in April 2007. Shortly after, I get sick and must forsake the Lotos-eating lands for bleary Blighty. I work on From Aberystwyth with Love which is published in the spring of 2009. And begin work on The Day Aberystwyth Stood Still to be published in the Spring of 2011.
...to be contd.
How I left the shores of my birth to work with the poor people in advertising: my long years before the mast, hardships nobly endured & perilous voyages undertaken to distant lands to drink beer; also narrative of ten years' residence among the wildmen of Aberystwyth, together with sundry remarks pertaining to the native girls of Siam.
