I can't retire from life. I love life too much and I cannot wait to start the day.

My biggest love is space. I completed 800 hours' space training in Moscow and I became the world's oldest man to go to the North Magnetic Pole. At 67, I also became the oldest man to reach 28,400ft on Everest without oxygen.

When I was in Downing Street, David Cameron saw me and said, "Please, shout it all around and let it penetrate to my cabinet meeting." So I bellowed: "Gordon's alive!"

I had to leave school at 14 because my father got injured in the mines and I had to support my family. I was an undertakers assistant, then a plasterer, before doing my military service in the RAF. All the while, I was doing amateur dramatics and dreaming of getting a scholarship to the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School.

The household I grew up in... was rather like an Ovaltine advert. There was a huge fire, a kettle on the fire, the oven with the bread being baked every day, and there was the radio; it was very magical to hear all these wonderful programmes.

I can't retire from life. I love life too much and I cannot wait to start the day.

Life is a re-discovery.