Daniel Light

Great to be back in Edinburgh thirty years after I arrived as a fresh(ish)-faced undergraduate with my whole adult life ahead of me.

This was the third outing for this talk, so I ditched the script and backed myself to be conversant in a subject I’ve been reading and writing about for six years.

All seemed to go well, thanks in part to a very responsive audience, and especially to Matthew Land of Blackwell’s Edinburgh, who made me feel very welcome and had set everything up perfectly.

Shortly before my Q&A at Tetbury Book Festival I was approached by Dermot McMeekin, grandson of Dr Tom Longstaff. For me, Longstaff is one of the true heroes of The White Ladder.

Dermot invited me to meet his mother, Lady Anne McMeekin, Longstaff’s only surviving daughter, who was kind enough to show me some photographs and share a few memories of her father.

Alistair Roberts, grandson of Geoffrey Bruce and author of ‘Forgotten Man of Everest’, was also at the festival. So here I am, pictured with direct descendants of not one but two members of the 1922 Mount Everest expedition.

The launch party took place at Burley Fisher Books in Haggerston, a shop I must have passed a thousand times in the writing of this book.

Thanks to Samuel Fisher for the use of his lovely shop, and to my editor Sam Carter for addressing the assembled ahead of my own teary-eyed utterances.

For years I’ve been walking past my local bookshops imagining a book of my own there in the window.

In the event, the first shop I would see it displayed in was Rossiter Books in Ross-on-Wye, the second stop on my book tour. Great to deliver my talk to a full house, and to meet the team at one of Andy and Victoria Rossiter’s chain of six lovingly curated independent bookshops.

Great to be invited to David’s Bookshop in Letchworth Garden City on the day of the book’s UK launch.

It can be tough to draw a crowd on the first leg of a book tour, especially for a debut writer, so I cheated and loaded the room with friends and family. It was a great way to celebrate publication day, delivering my illustrated talk for the very first time to an audience full of familiar faces.