by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Uncategorized
1. Knock on the door. 2. Housewife opens, quickly wedge your foot in. 3. Shove your way in, empty a bag of soot on her floor. 4. Before she calls the police, whip out your vacuum cleaner and clean up the mess. 5. Close the sale. Apparently it worked. A lot of vacuum...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Me being a berk, Travel
I met Leah on the floating bar in the bay of Puerta Gallera, a hundred or so miles south of Manila. She was crying and told me that she was missing her boyfriend from the Netherlands who would be sending her an air ticket. From the way she said it we both knew somehow...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Uncategorized
About six months after I finished my last novel I had a dream in which one of the characters in the novel appeared to me. She told me there was a continuity error in chapter 11. She said I’d got her home address wrong. When I awoke I remembered the dream and checked;...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 4, 2021 | Writing
The Crimean port of Caffa had been besieged by an army of Mongols under the command of General Janiberg for three years. Then the Black Death arrived and the besieging soldiers began to die like flies. General Janiberg had a bright idea. He would catapult his dead...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 3, 2021 | Obscure Wisdom
They say, ‘Never go back!’ don’t they? Never return to a place where once you knew happiness. Only disappointment awaits you, because, according to Heraclitus, you can’t step in the same river twice. It’s a piece of advice I would have done well to observe, but, no, I...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 3, 2021 | Writing
It may not be the obvious place to start but you could learn a lot about storytelling from the corpse-washers of ancient Egypt. Picture the scene. It’s a busy Monday morning. You’ve got three new Pharaohs to prepare for the journey to the next life. What is the first...
by Malcolm Pryce | Feb 3, 2021 | Obscure Wisdom
I have some bad news about the end of the world. Not only is the end of the world ‘nigh’, but it looks like it is going to be a damp squib. Certainly not worth waiting up for. Traditionally, Mankind has looked forward to this event safe in the knowledge that it would...
by Malcolm Pryce | Jan 31, 2021 | Travel
It was off the island of Niuatoputapu in Tonga that I discovered my Captain Bligh Quotient. (CBQ.) What is that, you ask? Your CBQ is the amount of time you can spend in a small boat with two people sailing across the South Pacific before your crew mates want to...
by Malcolm Pryce | Jan 31, 2021 | Uncategorized, Writing
It was Monday 25 April, 1988. I stood before the Magistrate in Marylebone Magistrate’s Court awaiting the words the verdict of the learned judge. Alongside me in the dock were two ladies from Glasgow who had been arrested for soliciting on Edgware Road. And there was...
by Malcolm Pryce | Jan 30, 2021 | Writing
In order to improve as a storyteller, it helps to have some sort of understanding about what storytelling is. And yet it is surprising how much confusion there is on the subject. For an object lesson in missing the point you could do a lot worse than refer to the...
