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I’ve made new friends and caught up with old ones at every stop on my book tour, and Topping & Company in Bath was no different.

I was taken by complete surprise when my cousin Briony and her family arrived. Her mother, my aunt Liz, has her own connection with mountaineering royalty – she was once au pair to the family of the legendary French alpinist Gaston Rébuffat.

This event also gave me the opportunity to meet Clare Homfray, god-daughter of George Mallory’s oldest child, the late Frances ‘Clare’ Mallory.

It’s incredibly moving for me each time I meet, in three dimensions, the friends and family of those who, until recently, had lived only on the page.

The promise of ‘an evening with Daniel Light’ made me wonder if I needed some jokes, a musical number, maybe even a bit of burlesque.

Instead, mindful that I’m still finding my feet in a new career, I left my tap shoes at home and let the slides do the talking.

Thanks to James for grabbing a few snaps of the talk, and for making the time to give me a wistful tour of Christ Church in the afternoon.

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.