For the lucky few, mountaineering provides an alternate realm of experience and consciousness that frees them from the conventions and routine of everyday life.

Growing up in nineteen-sixties Edinburgh, I found solace in the mountains and in climbing that became a restorative balm for the frustrations of a stifling home life.

With the beauty and grandeur of my beloved Scotland forming an eternal backdrop, I found a soulmate in my climbing partner and we fell in love.

Our love of mountains and the intoxicating thrill of climbing became inextricably interwoven with our love for each other so that we risked both our lives and our hearts in a journey that was to take us to the very limits of our physical and emotional endurance.

In a collection of thirteen true short stories about mountaineering, RISK attempts to explain some of the motivations that drive a climber’s compulsion to test themselves in the mountains.

Filled with cultural and locational references to a forgotten Edinburgh of the nineteen sixties and seventies, RISK is as much the story of a love affair with Scotland as it is with a Scottish woman.

When the English language fails, as it often does, to convey the searing intensity of feelings I have for Scotland’s people and places, I reflect on the Celtic idiom, “cuisle mo chroi” a uniquely Irish Gaelic endearment that literally translates as ‘pulse of my heart’, a sentiment which still carries an electrifying emotional power to move me.

“In any argument, the mountain will always have the last word.” Stig the lorry driver