Dave Gregory has been climbing for over forty years and writing short stories for nearly as long. This collection contains both fact and fiction triggered by that experience. The stories cover a broad spread over a wide canvas - the secret service, whimsy, ghosts, the perils and pleasures of skiing, Cairngorm white-out, Welsh vengeance. Which are fact and which are fiction? You will have to decide.

Although there is a bit of everything for everybody, the recurrent subjects centre round the hills and climbs of his almost obsessive pastime. Ratty, in Wind in the Willows, was convinced that 'messing about in boats' was the most idyllic way to spend one's time but he was wrong. In the hills is the place to be and these stories take you there. The crags and moors of the Peak District, the author's home ground, figure large but the situations extend, in winter and summer, to Wales, the lake District, Scotland and the Alps.

The sites of their creation are almost equally varied. While most of the earlier ones saw the light of day scribbled in an exercise book with the author comfortably ensconced in an armchair, others had less usual origins: maternity wards, up a ladder, on moorland walks, on a ski chair-lift; more than one on the narrow confines of a mountain belay, others in the back seat of a car thrashing its way to the hills; one in the loft filled to capacity with family's climbing, camping ang skiing gear and another during several days trapped in a Glen Coe barn with a Scots special raging outside. If variety be the spice of life here is savour aplenty whatever the season.