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up Everest.’

      He looked at me with an uncomfortable combination of alarm and insult. What was the matter with him?

      ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I thought we were thinking later in the year for SAS anyway.’

      ‘Yeah, yeah, sure. It was just, I was wondering – who’s covering that, then? Everest?’

      It took me a moment to realise what he was thinking.

      ‘What, filming it?’ I said. ‘Nobody’s covering it. It’s just a personal thing. I’m not doing a show about it.’

      With that, his discomfort melted into glee.

      ‘Well, we should get someone out there with you.’

      ‘Mate, I appreciate the thought, but I don’t know about this one,’ I said. ‘It’s kind of a holiday for me. I don’t want it to turn into some big production. I just want to keep it small. Me and the mountain.’

      ‘Oh, but we can keep it small,’ he said. ‘That’s no problem. That’s easy. We’ll strap a fucking GoPro on your hat and send one other dude up there with you.’

‘What, up Everest?’ I said. ‘You can find a cameraman who can keep up, all the way to the summit?’

      ‘I think I can,’ he said. ‘In fact, I know I can. Ed Wardle. He’s been up there like three times or something.’

      ‘To the summit?’

      ‘To the summit. You’d like him. Scottish. He filmed something that was a bit similar to Mutiny a few years back. Shackleton’s journey. Ernest Shackleton. Is that right? I think that’s right. Ernest Shackleton. They went across the Southern Ocean in a little lifeboat using period gear. Proper hardcore. They were living off bowls of, like, cold fat.’

      ‘How far did they go?’ I asked.

      ‘Um, can’t remember. Something like 800 miles, I think.’

      I looked down at my phone and began tapping at the volume buttons distractedly. ‘800 miles?’ I said. ‘He wants to try 4,000 miles.’

      ‘Think about it, Ant. Tell me you’ll think about it.’

      ‘Yeah, I will,’ I said. ‘I definitely will.’

I definitely wouldn’t. This wasn’t what I wanted at all. Part of the attraction of Mount Everest was that there were no rules up on the mountain. I could do what the hell I wanted, take as many risks as I needed to give me that edge I was seeking and generally get into as much trouble as I liked. Having a film crew there, even if it was just one guy, would ruin all that. I wanted to do this thing dangerously. I wasn’t going to take the easy route. Other people just didn’t understand my level of resilience. They didn’t know what I was capable of or what I’d experienced, and I didn’t want to be lumbered with well-meaning people, fussing about me, telling me what I could and couldn’t do.

      In the run-up to Mutiny there had been endless pressure from Channel 4 and the production company to do things as sensibly as possible. They’d called all the shots on Health and Safety. I was determined that the trip across the Pacific would be absolutely authentic and fought them all the way on the endless restrictions they kept trying to force upon us. But there was only so much I could do. We ended up making small modifications to the boat and we had nine people compared with the eighteen that went on the original voyage along with Captain Bligh. We were as near as we could be to keeping it real, but I’d have preferred to have kept the things that they removed. The thought of all this nonsense happening to my Everest adventure was not a welcome one.

But then a few weeks passed. And I thought about it. And I kept on going back to the fact that there were five numerals, a comma and a little curly squiggle that made the offer pretty much impossible to refuse. £60,000. The only thing about this trip that had given me reason to doubt its wisdom was the mad cost of it. I was willing to spend the money because I knew that was what it took. But I also had my family to think about. It was a serious amount of cash, and if I could use it for my wife and kids rather than me, and have to sacrifice a little freedom on the mountain to make it happen, then that felt like a trade I simply had to make. If someone else was actually willing to pick up the bill, I felt like I’d have to say yes.

      But that compromise soon led to another compromise, one that I was pretty unhappy about. The channel, and the production company, insisted that I book the trip through a different expedition firm. While the track record of Elite Himalayan Adventures was impeccable, they were still quite a young outfit and the terms of the expensive TV insurance they’d have had to take out dictated that we use people experienced with the particular demands of a film crew. That meant a group called Madison Mountaineering, based in Seattle, Washington and founded by Garrett Madison, who bills himself as ‘America’s premier Everest climber and guide’ and has garnered a reputation for taking the ‘ultra-wealthy’ up to the summit, with luxury trips that cost as much as $120,000. This sounded, to an uncanny extent, like exactly what I didn’t want.

Just three days before my flight to Kathmandu I’d come off the final date of my speaking tour. I’d been travelling the country for six weeks, taking my one-man show to theatres from Torquay to Leicester, Cardiff to Manchester, where I was lucky enough to have an audience of 2,500. It had been unbelievably good fun, getting out there and meeting people and hearing their stories, and I’d become so absorbed in the experience that when my departure date from Heathrow came along, it did so suddenly. To say I wasn’t mentally prepared for the trip would be an understatement. My head was in a completely different universe, still buzzing from the tour. The idea of going up the highest mountain in the world, in potentially deadly conditions, was one I hadn’t even begun getting my head around.

      If anything, my physical preparedness was even worse. I’d been eating badly for a month and a half, drinking half a bottle of wine every night and living mainly off chicken wings from the twenty-four-hour room service of the hotels I’d been staying in. I had a lingering memory of Gareth, my tour manager, knocking on my door one night and with a troubled look on his face asking, ‘How’s the training for Everest going?’ I’d picked up my large glass of red wine and toasted him merrily – ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

      On Everest there had been one fatality for every sixteenth person to have successfully climbed it. But I liked those odds. As I lay back on the pillows of my huge hotel bed, in my warm, fluffy hotel dressing-gown, licking Buffalo sauce off my fingertips in preparation for another sip of my nice Shiraz, one in sixteen didn’t seem like anything to worry about at all.

      And then, on a dull and rainy English spring morning, I found myself packing my luggage into the back of a taxi and going through the ritual of kissing my family goodbye. As I slammed the boot of the cab shut, my two-year-old daughter Priseïs, clinging on to her favourite pink mouse-ear backpack, suddenly burst into tears as she registered that Daddy was going away somewhere for a long time.

‘I know, I know, I know, baby,’ I said. But I couldn’t calm her.

      As my car swung out of the centre of Chelmsford I switched on the little camera that I’d been given to film my journey and pointed it at my face. ‘It’s never nice saying goodbye. I’m just going to dwell on it for a couple of minutes. Get it out of my system and then get my head in the game.’

      I turned the thing off and looked out at the wet trees and the grey motorway. I was close to tears.

      But by the time I was pushing up my tray table to prepare for the landing at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International, that familiar bittersweet sadness was long gone. I was about to alight in a brand new country, one of my most favourite little pleasures. There’s not much else that can fill me with such simple childish delight as the sight of an airport sign spelled out in an unfamiliar alphabet.

When I’m in a foreign land it always feels as if the chains have been taken off, especially these days, when it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to move about unnoticed. Stepping off the

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