Then, as I read through your story, your books, your interviews, and I'm running, I'm

watching a YouTube documentary of you sailing across the Atlantic many years ago. Obviously,

the most sort of striking, distinctive, standout thing about the way that you've chosen

to live your life over the last couple of decades is your seemingly insatiable appetite for

adventure, risk, challenge, extreme adventure as it relates to Everest and things like that.

Where did that come from? I think it's not necessarily an absolute thirst for adventure.

I think it's about finding the real me. If I go right back as a child, I was so shy. I had no

confidence. I failed all my exams. I was hopeless at sport. Actually, I think all of the things

that I've done since have been about rebuilding. It sounds a weird way to describe it, but it's not

just, I'm not an adrenaline junkie. There's this assumption that maybe that would be how to

describe myself. It's not that at all. It's the thing that I do really, really slow.

Rowing across the Atlantic took the best part of two months. Walking across Antarctica took many,

many months. Climbing Everest took many months. If it was jumping off a mountain-based jumping

or going on a motorbike or even a mountain bike down a steep slope, I hate all that. It's too

fast. I quite like this slow movement, but I'm quite good at long endurance events. All of

those have been about rebuilding my confidence. What took your confidence? Why didn't you have confidence?

I think it's the fact that I was hopeless academically for many different reasons.

Undiagnosed dyslexia. I kind of a slight mistake maybe, not on my parents' part, but my father's

Canadian. He wanted me to be bilingual, so I was sent to a French school, and I just didn't.

I couldn't do the French school. The French system, and with all apologies to any French watching

or listening to this, it's just quite a hard system, the French one. It was quite strict.

And I'm just as a child, I was surrounded by dogs. Dad was a vet. Mum was an actress. It was

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