child that would rely on me for the next 20 years or so. I was responsible for caring, sharing and preparing this little boy for life.
I had to teach him what was right and what was wrong. What was good and what was bad. Love and hate. Fear and loss. I was overwhelmed at the incredible burden of responsibility. What if I got it wrong? What if I failed? Can you fail at being a father?
No amount of planning or preparation can really prepare you for the magnitude of the journey. You can’t press the pause button. You can’t change your mind. Fatherhood is an unstoppable expedition into the unknown.
Expedition isn’t a bad way to describe it. You try to plan and prepare. It involves a whole new routine that often includes sleep deprivation and fear. It’s like you enter a new world in which you’re never really sure if you are right or wrong.
I felt guilty about taking even the shortest overseas assignments, which was at odds with my instinctive desire to feather my nest financially. Money had never been a priority; of course it is a powerful enabler, but I’ve always been happy with simplicity, and the desire to accumulate great wealth has never been an ambition.
Overnight, this relaxed attitude changed into a sort of panic. As a freelancer, I had no guarantee of work from one day to the next. The vulnerability of a TV presenter cannot be underestimated. Our value can plunge overnight in the blink of a single scandal or change of a commissioner. Fashions change, and with them presenters come and go. As Piers Morgan likes to say, ‘One minute you are the cock of the walk, the next you are a feather duster.’
Most of all, I wanted to be a good role model. I admired, and still admire, both my parents. I am so proud of their achievements, and part of my own drive has been to make them equally proud. For me to succeed in life feels like success for them as parents.
Success isn’t always about impressing other people, but how can you ever define success if there is no one to congratulate you?
It wasn’t long before Marina was pregnant with our second child, Iona. Once again, we dipped into the nocturnal fog of parenthood, and once again I found myself torn by the contradiction of wanting to be a stay-at-home dad. To nurture and protect while at the same time battling my desire to build up my financial resources and work.
It was like trying to juggle too many balls. Family, friends, work, ambition and adventure. You can’t have your cake and eat it. The problem was that adventure has always been at the heart of who I am, and while instinct drove me to nest build, passion for the pursuit of adventure was driving me closer and closer to Everest, my childhood dream.
For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to climb her. The first time I remember seeing a photograph of Everest was in National Geographic magazine. It seemed so extraordinary that man, with all our advancement, had taken until 1953 to get to the top.
I spent hours staring at those photographs of the towering peak, of weathered faces and heroic sherpas. There was something so romantically mesmerising and alluring about her. Dangerous and beautiful. I found myself dreaming about her. Thinking about her. But it was always just that. A dream. Like the pretty girl at school, I was never going to get her. I wasn’t a mountaineer. It seemed beyond my grasp on so many levels.
I’m not sure what it was that so captivated me. The remoteness. The romance of the highest place on earth. The drama. The tragedy. She has been at centre stage for so many incredible tales. Some heroic. Many tragic. Plenty unexplained.
As a young boy, summiting Everest represented the pinnacle of human endeavour. In my young mind, it was the ultimate achievement. It required grit, strength, bravery and confidence. None of which I had very much of, which is maybe why it had such magnetism. Here was a mountain that attracted the brave few; the romantics pursuing their standing at the top of the world.
Over the years, I had met plenty of people who had climbed Everest: Kenton Cool, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Bear Grylls, Annabelle Bond, Jake Meyer, the list goes on. To be honest, I seemed to know more people who had climbed it than hadn’t. I felt like the odd one out. It always made me feel like I had missed out on this incredible moment. Not in a ‘bagging’ or ‘ticking off’ kind of a way, but in the pursuit of my dream.
Many people are put off by the number of those who have climbed Everest. Nearly 4,000 have had the privilege of standing on the top of the world. I’d say out of a world population of over 7 billion, that’s still quite small.
It is difficult to define ‘why’. When Mallory was asked he famously answered, ‘because it’s there’. As flippant as it sounds, I can relate to his sentiments. We live in an age where there has to be a purpose and reason for everything we do.
There had never been a clear ‘purpose’ for me to climb Everest. In past conversations with Marina she had quite rightly explained that if climbing and mountaineering was my passion, then I should, and could quite justifiably, attempt a summit, but why? She had asked, why would I risk so much for so little?
Was I not risking my life to simply stand on a point? The answer is yes and no. For me, the Everest dream has always been so much more than just an ego trip. It’s the whole thing. The trek to Base Camp. The Icefall. The Western Cwm, the Lhotse Face, the South Col, the Balcony, the Hillary Step. For me, having read countless books, these places have the same spiritual draw as a pilgrimage.
Everest has always represented everything I dream of achieving. It has always had a wild, dangerous romance that is at the same time both terrifying and electrifying. It fills me, has always filled me, with such wondrous fascination and appeal. Like a forbidden fruit. So close and yet so far. Within touching distance.
It’s like an historian visiting the archaeological sites of the world, or a geographer visiting the geological sites.
I was wrestling with the balance between my need for adventure and my love of my family. Can you justifiably juggle both? Where is the line between sensible and selfish? I had found myself torn between the pursuit of my dreams and my family, who are my everything.
In the end, it comes down to who I am and what makes me who I am. Without travel, without adventure and without wilderness, I am nothing. Life is about embracing the good and the bad. It is the heady mix of fear, danger, adversity, heroics, romance, wilderness, beauty, tragedy, love, loss and achievement. Ultimately, it’s about pursuing our dreams. To dare to do. To dare to go where others fear.
What more can you ask for in life?
Everest would give me all that. It was a gamble. It was risky. There were dangers, but if I wasn’t being true to myself then how could I be honest to my own family? I just had to persuade Marina that climbing the highest mountain on earth was a good idea for all of us.
For as long as I can remember, Ben has wanted to climb Everest. I guess, when you’re in his line of work, wanting to scale the tallest mountain in the world should come as no surprise. But Ben is a dreamer and I’m a realist, and when he’d talked of his lofty ambition, I’d always pooh-poohed the idea, dismissing his dream.
It’s not that I wasn’t seduced by the world’s tallest mountain in the way that he was. I grew up on a diet of adventure books. I spent my gap year reading the mountaineering authors Joe Simpson and Jon Krakauer. The ambitions of my 18-year-old self, aspirational and seemingly immortal, included participating in the Vendée Globe –
