'I wake pretty early, about 6am. My wife and I argue about who is going to go and get the tea and one of us will get it. We live in the English Lake District in a rambling kind of cottage. Early morning is my favourite time of the day. Especially in the summer, when there is a lovely, translucent light. At that time, the telephone doesn't go and it's very, very quiet. I can get on with a lot of work and that's very special.
For breakfast we have Columbian coffee and toast with marmalade. Then I go back to work. Work might be writing a book, planning an expedition or preparing a speech. The first book I wrote took me a couple of years to write - from 1963 to 1965 - and I've been writing ever since, about 20 books altogether. I'll usually work until lunch. In the winter, lunch is soup and in the summer it's salad. Then I go rock climbing.
There are loads of crags about half an hour's drive from our house. I'll do a couple of small climbs along there until early evening. Then, on the way back, I'll stop off at a lovely English pub for a pint before supper. Sometimes I cook, sometimes my wife Wendy cooks. She's a vegetarian. I'm not, but we tend to have vegetarian food. It might be vegetable curry, it might be pasta or it might be fish. We like simple things, usually just one course, washed down with some wine.
I was born and brought up in Hampstead. I went to a London day school. During the second world war, when I was very young, I was evacuated to the Lake District and that's when I first became conscious of mountains.
The Himalayas is my favourite place. It's a combination of the whole thing - the mountains, the culture and the people. Everything about them I find captivating - especially in Nepal, where the people are so intrepid.
These days I don't make huge expeditions. It's usually just a bunch of friends; we go to the Indian Himalayas or Nepal. We'll go for small peaks - maybe 5,500 or 6,000 metres - that haven't been climbed, ideally in areas where tourists and trekkers haven't been at all so there is an element of exploration in it. There are still literally hundreds of unclimbed peaks and unvisited valleys in the Himalayas. The crowds concentrate on the big ones. They concentrate on Mount Everest, and that's great. It means the more skilled ones are still unspoiled and that's why I like to go and climb.