Politicians lead strange lives, but nothing is odder than the adventures of an ex-politician. In this wise and funny book John Button tells us what he's been up to since leaving the Senate in 1993. He declares himself psychotic in China and recalls a love affair in Rome. He exchanges letters with the mysterious Hannah Prisk, and visits the fourteenth most profitable restaurant in the United States.
We see him failing to do his Christmas shopping, jogging in New York and losing his money at the Melbourne Cup. Along the way reflects on everything from technological change and political correctness to election campaigns and Australia's relationship with Asia. And he meets the oddest people on aeroplanes.

When Lillian Beckwith advertised for a secluded place in the country, she received a letter with the following unusual description of an isolated Hebridean croft: 'Surely it's that quiet even the sheeps themselves on the hills is lonely and as to the sea it's that near as I use it myself everyday for the refuals...' Her curiosity aroused, Beckwith took up the invitation.

A mountaineering travelogue of dazzling variety, the story moves from the camaraderie of deprived Russian climbers in the little-known peaks in the Tien Shan to the awesome experience of the North Face of the Eiger, from a rumbustious motorbike ride across Asia to hitch hiking across Australia with a psychotic lorry driver.