Anything and everything. I watched the Olympics and wanted to be an 800m runner. If I watched Inspector Morse, I wanted to be a pathologist.

I always wanted to be a rapper.

Most days, I wanted to be Albrecht in the classical ballet Giselle, dancing until I dropped dead.

A stuntman. Evel Knievel was an icon.

Well, then of course, came the disaster in 1975, when my wife and my youngest daughter were flying into the Nepal hills where I was building a hospital and their plane crashed and they were killed. And this certainly, for me, was an absolute disaster, really because the two people that meant most to me in life had been killed in one fell swoop. It did take me quite a number of years to get over it. I found the only way to deal with it was to carry on very energetically, doing the things that we had all been doing together, which was largely building schools and things for the mountain people. Although, people used to say to me, “Time is the great healer,” certainly for the first two years I simply didn’t accept this. But, time was a great healer and after the years passed, the memories still remain. But, I think quite a lot of the pain tends to fade a little bit, and life did become a little bit easier.

I did have — definitely — one heroic figure who impressed me very much indeed, and that was the great Antarctic explorer, Shackleton. Shackleton I always admired because he was a tough man and a very good leader. And whenever he was in difficult circumstances, which he frequently was, he seemed to have the great ability to inspire his men and lead his party safely out of those conditions. So certainly Shackleton, I would have said, more than anything, was a role model for me.

I think most of our major challenges are not going to be in the physical field at all. I think they’re going to be in the field of human relations, of getting on with each other, of contributing. People accepting that they have to contribute something, their thoughts, their ideas, maybe even their money, towards producing a world society that is perhaps a little bit more honest and reasonable than it is now.

I still regard adventure pretty much as a hobby to tell you the honest truth, and I think this approach to it keeps one refreshed almost. I think if you just regard adventure as a business, working becomes very boring as many other businesses can become. But even though adventure changed my life considerably, both in what I was doing and even economically, I’ve always regarded myself in a sense as a competent amateur.

As I’ve gotten older, my goals have become more solidified. My main concentration is on the welfare of the people I’ve worked with in the Himalayas and on human welfare in general. I’m also extremely interested in the environment and trying to encourage people to be more concerned about what we’re doing to our world. Now I’m just one of thousands and thousands of people who have these same views these days. I think this is one of the great steps forward we’ve seen in modern decades — the considerable growing interest that people have in the environment and in keeping it reasonably clean and wholesome. I certainly hope it remains that way.

The press and the public have created an image of Ed Hillary, hero and explorer which simply doesn’t exist. They’ve painted a picture of me as a heroic type, full of enormous courage, tremendous strength, undying enthusiasm and all the rest of it. But it’s all really just a story, that’s been written up in the newspapers. I’m a person, as I’ve said, of modest abilities, with a good deal of determination, and I do quite a lot of planning ahead. With careful planning and good motivation, I think you can often achieve things that other much more talented people would probably do much more easily.