A slippery slope.
Rather than being a metaphor for the foolhardiness of embarking upon book projects, the title above describes the kind of mudstone foreshore along which many of us have skittered at one stage or another.
On the northern Taranaki coastline (at Tongaporutu) the passage of both human and hound has been made a little safer by the small interventions that have been carved out of the intertidal mudstone leading to the Three Sisters.