London is a great place to be over Christmas.

I used to live on a houseboat near Hammersmith Bridge.

As a young man, the temptation was to drink the minibar dry. I did all that - now I prefer to get outdoors.

I discovered I'm 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I'm also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.

My earliest memory is feeling soil between my fingers when I was around three years old.

I grew up in a little town between Bath and Bristol with my parents and grandparents in the same house. It was rural and idyllic.

People perceive me as this kind of hippy intellectual, reflecting and communing with nature or in a pyramid somewhere chanting. Really, no. I love speed, fast things, quad and road bikes, and bombing down a mountain.

Fatherhood made everything more straightforward. I was relieved that no longer did I have to agonise over what meaning I had in my life.

If you really push yourself you can perhaps achieve something you didn't think you could.