When I first set out to write my book during the 2012/13 ski season, a season which coincidentally saw the heaviest accumulated snowfall in the French Alps for over 70 years  I naively imagined it would take me three months.

In the end it has taken a little over three years, during which time I have discovered a statistically significant inverse correlation between fresh snowfall and writing productivity.

I’ve lost count of the number of writing hours sacrificed in the search for fresh powder but I don’t regret a single one of them. No-one looks back from their death-bed and wishes they’d spent more time in the office. Do they?

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is available as an Amazon Kindle e-book

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.