A personal account of how one man's promising future as a pianist was curtailed, and instead he became a world adventurer exploring off-beat destinations.

With the dry humor and typical understatement of an English northerner, this earthy narrative introduces the reader to a life lived like a tin can tied to a dog’s tail. One moment the writer is sharing a Huey helicopter with the Norwegian Airforce to discover mysterious caves beyond the Arctic Circle, then he is off climbing mountains on four continents or beating Melanesians in an archery contest.

His wacky adventures find him, cycling through the Italian Alps, bedding down with a tribe of corpse eaters in the Land of Laughing Death, becoming embroiled in tribal unrest in Papua New Guinea and dining on python, bats and rats. If that was not enough he attempts to keep one step ahead of major natural disasters in South America, and in a single day tries not to be poached alive, frost-bitten, sunburnt, asphyxiated, roasted, sand-blasted, scarified by winds strong enough to remove beards, and steamed until tender in the Land of Ice and Fire.