Mick Fowler - No Easy Way: The challenging life of the climbing taxman

And what do you think have been your main achievements this year?

It was 2002, end-of-year appraisal time and my tax office boss was going through the usual motions. There was no doubt in my mind that the most significant achievement of my year had been a successful expedition to climb an eye-catching ice streak on a mountain called Siguniang in Chinas Sichuan province. I was really pleased with the way Paul Ramsden and I had found a way through the legendary Chinese bureaucracy and spent six days climbing a fantastic new line. For this we won a Piolet dOr, the mountaineering worlds equivalent of an Oscar, at a lavish ceremony in Paris. There was a hesitation as I wondered whether or not this might be a good achievement to mention.

I think your paper on discounts for unmarketability was very useful, my boss prompted, and your work embedding a Lean way of working in the office has been much appreciated.

Climbing left my mind as I was dragged into my working world. I have always kept the different aspects of my life very separate, even to the extent of being called Mike at work, Mick in my climbing life and Michael when in trouble at home.

My job at the tax office had varied a lot since I joined in 1977. At that time the Inland Revenue had offered the best salary with which to replenish my bank account in between summer climbing trips. I worked in a north London collection office, knocking on peoples doors and asking them to pay outstanding tax. The job was only meant to tide me over between trips, but when the time came to head out for another summer in the Alps, it was suggested that I could take the time off as a combination of flexi-leave and annual leave and save myself the hassle of looking for a job when I got back. This tempted me to stay and on my return I was unexpectedly propelled up the promotion ladder.

The job was often tedious but fitted well with climbing and so I just kind of stayed with it. Part of my role involved visiting tax offices around the country to assess their staffing needs. Wherever possible I rented accommodation from climbing friends and joined local climbing scenes, giving me an introduction to numerous obscure climbing areas that I would never otherwise have visited.

I also viewed London as a pretty good place for a climber to live. That might sound odd, but its sheer size and diversity meant there was a sizeable pool of adventurous people to draw from and finding like-minded partners for whatever obscure activity one might want to pursue at the weekend was never a problem.

The advent of family life made me view things differently. Nicki and I married in 1991 and our first child, Tess, was born in 1992. Weekend visits to the country became trickier and moving to a place where climbing venues were more easily accessible seemed an attractive proposition. As it happened, fortune shone upon us, and the tax office made a decision to move specialist jobs out of London and to a site in Nottingham. I successfully applied for a job in the Inland Revenues shares and assets valuation section; we decided that Nickis job of restoring watercolours for London galleries could be carried out anywhere, and we ended up buying a large wreck of a house in the small town of Melbourne, twenty miles to the west of Nottingham and much closer to the great outdoors and the Peak District than London.

The house reputedly dated from the 1600s and I vividly remember walking in and looking up to see straight through to the inside of the roof. But where I saw only hassle, Nicki saw potential, as the estate agents say, and after nine years of effort had scoured every architectural salvage yard within a 150-mile radius and restored the house to something like its former glory. It was long, hard slog but eventually Nickis efforts were such that they featured in Period Living and Traditional Home magazines in the UK and The English Home magazine in the USA. My DIY and building skills, however, are woefully inadequate and my efforts at art and design even worse. This meant that my contribution tended to be leaving early and returning late to marvel at how piles of junk were transformed into beautiful useable items. Quite a few climbing friends got involved in various stages of the project. I recall Andy Cave perched on the ridge of an outbuilding asking for advice on pointing ridge tiles and Bert Simmonds sticking his foot through a ceiling and spilling limewash into his eyes such that he had to be taken to hospital.

Our second child, Alec, was born in 1994 and as work and family commitments grew it was perhaps inevitable that climbing trips would become less frequent. I enjoyed all forms of climbing, from technical rock to Scottish winter to alpine-style mountaineering in the Himalaya. It was the weekend climbing that was the most difficult to maintain. I very much wanted to be around and immersed in family things at weekends and, even when I did arrange weekends away, I found that they were always vulnerable to last-minute changes of family plans and to irresistible pleas along the lines of Oh Dad, please, please, please can you go away a different weekend? Faced with such pressures it was perhaps inevitable that my rock climbing standard gradually declined. Curiously, the decline in my winter climbing standard was not so marked.

I managed to keep some semblance of fitness, meeting up with a group of friends once a week to do something that made us breathe heavily. In the summer that meant rock climbing, but in the winter when the evenings were dark, it could involve anything from caving to kayaking, running, cycling or, if we were short on ideas, the climbing wall although this was very much a last resort. The other exercise that fitted in well was fell racing. With the Peak District so close there were numerous races to choose from and although I trailed along near the back of the field, my efforts did seem to help with the speed of my walking and the non-technical side of mountaineering.

The one area of climbing I was determined to keep up was my greater-range climbing. The retrospective pleasure from greater-range successes and trips like Siguniang was delightfully enduring compared to weekend action. And, importantly, the organisation required was such that dates were known well in advance and family and work activities could be planned around them. When the children were young, I organised trips on alternate years, but this changed to shorter trips every year as they grew up, squeezing expeditions into the few weeks leave I had each year.

My boss was still waiting. I pushed mountaineering thoughts to the back of my mind, looked at him closely and heard myself telling him about the terribly difficult cases I had settled, the vast amount of yield (tax collected) I had secured and the horrendous management challenges I had overcome. It all went very well and I left the room content to be awarded a bonus.

But, internally, I was most satisfied to have succeeded on Siguniang and to have completed another year of safely juggling work, climbing and family life. And that is what this book is about: the ups and downs and stresses and strains of fitting the little-understood urges of a greater-range mountaineer into the well-understood challenges of being a family man with a full-time job. There truly is No Easy Way.