Blog Archives
Survival of the Fittest
In Adventures of a Looney Scot, you share your childhood experiences in Glasgow and trace your life through class, landscape, and national identity through a comedic lens. What made you decide to tell your life story?
I am no ‘spring chicken’, hence I need to speak up now for my children’s sake, or forever hold my tongue. Note that Adventures of a Looney Scot follows the first part of our hero’s life (see video link) as described in Book 1 of the Quantum Leap Forward trilogy that sets the scene for Ewan MacLeod’s leap from Scotland to Hong Kong. (see Facebook). This is soon to be followed by Book 2 Epicentre: Hong Kong (Edition 2) when that city state experiences the shock of The Big One; then finally Book 3 The Making of Punta – our resort in the Philippines that presents the development of The Most Sustainable and Liveable Resort in the Philippines (see Punta Riviera Resort and also Facebook).
How did you decide what to include from such a wide-ranging life without losing that sense of spontaneity?
As described above, each stage is presented as a book in the trilogy. My life has, in fact, been discontinuous and very much shaped by movements from growing up in Scotland, then moving to Hong Kong, life and death in Hong Kong; then moving to the Philippines; each being very much moulded by the three women in my life who have kept us in shape, given us strong direction, and helped us keep our own and our families’ heads above water. When all else fails – exercise your sirtuin genes and – keep breathing! Ach well, that’s life!
Your family life is depicted with both chaos and loyalty. How do you see those dynamics now, looking back?
Keeping our heads above water includes that from tsunamis and flooding, for example, from two super typhoons in the latter part of 2025 and a 4-6m high tidal surge wave that smacked into our resort Punta Riviera Resort at Bolinao, Pangasinan. The stories throughout this trilogy are partly about picking ourselves up after each disaster and learning from them. Filipinos have specific words for this recovery, namely Kapwas or Bayanihan, where everyone gets up after a disaster, helps everyone else near them to do the same by seeing themselves in others, then all move forward in the same direction. In the West, we follow the philosophy of ‘Survival of the Fittest,’ which is a very weak alternative and not how civilizations have survived natural disasters over centuries. When Matt Gandi was asked by a reporter after visiting Churchill’s cabinet in London: ‘So what do you think about British Civilization?’ he is reported to have replied: ‘Oh, that would be nice.’
If readers take one thing from your story, what do you hope it is?
Readers may appreciate that in Scotland, our Ancient Ancestors from a previous civilization left us precious ancient cultural secrets that helped us keep the Roman Empire out by forcing them to build Hadrian’s Wall, the English wall-bangers at bay for many years, and this helped us maintain our unique national identity. This led to our unusual DNA and our use of intuition, invention, and creativity during and after the Age of Enlightenment and Industrialization. However, whilst these are important issues, my pride in being a Scot and maintaining a healthy sense of humour are the key ingredients in this soup.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
I Was Just Sitting There Eating A Salad…
I Was Just Sitting There Eating a Salad… is a loose, comic tapestry rather than a traditional story collection with hard walls between pieces. The book keeps circling back to Green City and its recurring cast, especially Edward Loomis, the salad-eating private detective whose disastrous encounters become a running joke, while other stories widen the town into something stranger and more affectionate. One minute, the book is leaning into broad farce with names like Randolph and Imogene Scary and a whole town rattled by an “alien” misunderstanding, and the next it opens into more ambitious comic sci-fi through Jerald Cross, Sarah Smart, Greg Lieberman, and the wormhole device that turns a small West Virginia town into the center of increasingly absurd adventures. What finally holds it together is the sense that Green City is its own comic universe, one where gossip, coincidence, pulp plotting, and homemade science all somehow belong in the same weather.
The opening salad story is such a good example of the collection’s method because it commits completely to repetition, timing, and escalation until Edward’s laugh becomes practically mythic. I also found myself genuinely charmed by the way the stories start cross-pollinating. “Wormhole” could have felt like it came from a different book, but instead, it deepens the world, giving the collection a stronger spine than I expected. The courtroom frame, the teenage inventiveness, and the uneasy moral turn after the Nevada chase give that story real momentum, and later pieces gain extra pleasure because they’re no longer isolated gags. By the time the book gets to ghosts, pranks, and military suspicion, it’s working with a whole local mythology, and I admired how casually it builds that mythology without ever sounding solemn about it.
Author Victor Coltey’s prose has a talky, easy-going looseness that can be funny, especially when a narrator is half deadpan and half delighted by his own nonsense, but it can keep pushing after the laugh has landed. Some of the character descriptions and comic premises are intentionally outrageous, though for me they worked. There were stretches where I felt the book’s affection for eccentricity and caricature was warm and knowing. The author’s note helped confirm what the stories themselves suggest, which is that the book is openly trying to mix humor, sci-fi, and what Coltey calls “a little idiocy,” and I think that self-awareness is important because it frames the collection less as polished satire than as a homemade comic world built out of tall tales, genre love, and an authentic voice.
This book is rough-edged, but also lively, distinctive, and cohesive. Its best stories have the pleasure of hearing a practiced raconteur keep a straight face while the town around him slips further into absurdity, and its larger appeal is the way it treats small-town life as a stage big enough for wormholes, ghosts, Sasquatch, and very bad lunches. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy offbeat regional humor, linked story collections, and comic speculative fiction that feels homemade rather than slick. It’s the kind of book for someone who likes their fiction odd, chatty, and full of personality.
Pages: 203 | ASIN : B0GG7TV3TG
