"LIKE playing a game of snakes and ladders. . ."
That is how author Hannah Bourne-Taylor describes her ongoing campaign to make the installation of Swift bricks mandatory in new housing developments.
Just when she believes she has made a vital breakthrough in negotiations with Government ministers and civil servants, she gets knocked back.
Almost everyone, it seems, is eager to support her initiative, but no one is prepared to sign on the dotted line.
This week sees the publication of Ms Bourne-Taylor's eagerly-awaited book, Nature Needs You, which chronicles her crusade to secure a future in Britain for the Swift, one of the country's most charismatic species that has been in ever-hastening decline throughout the 30-plus years of the author's life.
This is a fast-paced, often exhilarating narrative which, at times, reads almost like detective fiction. But it is also valuable as a case study in how to put together from scratch a campaign which, if it is to succeed, requires Government endorsement.
Some of the writing is delightful - for instance, her description of Swifts as "tiny black anchors in the sky" and of money spiders as "eight-legged Mary Poppins".
To be honest, the author is a bit of an eccentric.
She confides that, on her honeymoon, she chanced upon an injured bird, picked it up, tucked it into her bra and took it to a rehabilitation centre.
She also admits to scooping drowning insects from puddles and moving snails off paths to save them from being trodden on.
When in the centre of towns and cities, she habitually carries loose oats in her pockets to feed any pigeons that look in need of a square meal.
But these moments of enchantment are counterbalanced by episodes of despair - for instance, when, helplessly, she watches a Swift exhausting itself as it tries and fails to enter a nest cavity that has been sealed by human intervention.
"To witness a Swift trying to get into a blocked home is to have the horror etched on your mind forever," she writes.
There is plenty of parliamentary nitty-gritty in the book, and politicos will be fascinated by the accounts of her encounters with the likes of former Conservative Cabinet members Michael Gove (whom she describes as a "pantomime villain") and Therese Coffey whom she found both ill-informed and condescending.
The author's stubborn determination could not be more commendable given the number of times she felt she was being "flicked away like an annoying fly".
But, in the end, the build-up of frustration resulted in what at first she thought might have been a breakdown.
"I was physically depressed and weighed down with gloom," she recalls.
Happily, she recovered from her brush with illness - it was diagnosed by her GP as labyrinthitis - and she battles on.
Since last year's General Election, Labour has assumed power, and the author's initial conversation with Steve Reed, the Labour Government's Environment Secretary has been encouraging - but there is still no signature on the dotted line.
For that Hannah - and Swift-lovers everywhere - must wait.
Subtitled The Fight To Save Our Swifts, Nature Needs You is published on Thursday May 1 at £16.99 in hardback by Elliott & Thompson.