Times UK Online edition
March 14, 2000
Interview by Ann Treneman

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has temporarily lost most of his sight and permanently lost part of his fingers, but he is determined to carry on exploring.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes has been called the world's greatest living explorer, but on the day that I meet him he does not look so great at all. He shuffles into the room in woolly sheepskin slippers. He squints in my direction and announces that he can see me only "in outline". He is holding his left hand in front of his body like a seal flipper. It is twice its normal size and tricoloured: fleshy palm, raw pink knuckles, black and withering fingertips. It is the hand of a witch. It was the only topic of conversation for some time.

I felt rather guilty about this because Sir Ranulph, or Ran as he prefers to be called, has just returned from a failed attempt at a solo trip to the North Pole. As such, there were many deep and meaningful things to discuss. He had trained for three years for this expedition and the Arctic had beaten him in just a few days. He has lost his pride, his sponsorship, his book contract. It is a total disaster for a man of 56. But all of that had to wait. The hand could not be ignored.

Squeamish? Well, skip this paragraph and the next because Sir Ranulph and I are not. We are enthralled by the details of frostbite. It had happened in seconds: he put this hand into the Arctic waters to save his sledge and that was that. It took days before he made it to a hospital in Ottawa, Canada. There a surgeon popped the huge blisters on his fingers and started taking the skin off.

"You've heard of flaying? It was a torture used in the Middle Ages. That is what he did." He whips out some pictures of his freshly flayed fingers. It looks painful beyond belief. We discuss it all over again. We are medical voyeurs.

Sir Ranulph is squinting like mad at the pictures. The hospital treatment involved two hours in a hyperbaric chamber breathing pure oxygen three times a day. The good news is that this surfeit of oxygen has saved millimetres of his fingers. The bad news is that he cannot see. He seems entirely calm about this. "Oh, they explained that this could happen. You have to sign a form. It will take two months until I can see again." I say that that is appalling. "Oh, I don't mind. It's better than being blown up." Was that another option? "Oh yes. Oxygen is very volatile. Sometimes the chambers just incinerate. They have a history of that. One went up in Italy and took six people with it." What does he mean? "They blew out like cannon balls. They were in bits."

So, obviously then, Sir Ranulph is way ahead of the game. He had been back from Canada for two days when we met last week at his home in Exmoor, a lovely old farm cottage that smells of jasmine from a particularly abundant specimen in the front hall. This is the work of his wife, Ginnie. They have been married for 30 years and met when she was nine and he 12. She used to be a "polar person", too, but for the past 15 years has run a beef cattle farm.

Sir Ranulph likes drama, and the directions to the farm sound like something out of a Milk Tray advert, though one with cattle grids. I arrive and park more or less vertically. A black cat jumps in the car and glares at me. Later he would sit on my notebook, defying me to write. His name is Fingal and he is an attack cat. It is important not to try to move him. The last person who did was the man who delivers oil and he had to be taken to Minehead Hospital.

In fact, that very afternoon Sir Ranulph is heading off to a hospital in Bristol to talk to a "finger cutter" about his hand. "I will lose half my thumb. I will lose half my rude-gesture finger. From the other three I will lose the tops." He says there is no feeling at all in the tips - "they are dead, dead meat" - and that he could just leave them to drop off on their own, though that would risk gangrene. In six months the new skin will have grown over the stumps.

So, it will take until the end of the year to recover from just a few days in the Arctic? He nods happily at this observation. He says he will have a grip, and it takes a moment to realise that he is talking about his hand. A grip is crucial, he says, because canoeing, climbing and bicycling are all important ways of keeping ultra-fit. He is a member of England's Eco-Challenge Endurance Team and thinks that this is wonderful. I note that 125-mile canoe races and running up 15,000ft mountains in Morocco are some people's idea of hell. "I love it," he says. I decide to ask the obvious question gently.

Me: "But at some point you might have to stop."

Sir Ranulph: "I don't wish to do that."

Me: "What do you mean?"

Sir Ranulph: "I don't envisage that that should be for quite a long time."

Me: "But what about expeditions?"

Sir Ranulph: "I have to be sensible. If the stumps on my fingers are cold-sensitive, I will have to move to hot expeditions. If they are normal, I will do hot and cold."

Me: "But giving up may be part of getting old."

Sir Ranulph: "Probably."

Me: "Even you will get old."

Sir Ranulph: "If I started saying that sort of thing and one of those people on the Eco-Challenge team heard it, they might think 'He's getting old, we're going to sack him'."

Me: "Otherwise, they would think you were 34, of course."

Sir Ranulph: "What?"

Me: "Otherwise, they would think that you were 34." Sir Ranulph: "Well, as long as they know that I'm not going to hold up the team. I don't have to be the fastest but I don't want to be the slowest. You don't need to start thinking about that."

There are many things that Sir Ranulph does not like to think about, or at least admit to thinking about. Anthony Clare, who interviewed him for the radio programme In the Psychiatrist's Chair, described the process as like "stirring a void with a teaspoon". Sir Ranulph loves this. "I found it quite satisfactory that he had spent 45 minutes trying to get to the bottom of me, how I tick, and hadn't succeeded. I found that a victory. I spent a lot of time with the Special Forces learning how to resist interrogation. I took it on as a project."

Every time I ask Sir Ranulph about emotions he tells me an unrelated story. In this way, I learn about toiletry habits in Antarctica (once a day, in the tent, is best). I discover that you do not take toothbrushes because they weigh too much. Nor do you take a change of clothes except a pair of underwear for when the originals "shred after 50 days".

He is better on facts. Sir Ranulph Twisleton-WykehamFiennes was born just after his father, a colonel in the Royal Scots Greys, died of wounds in a battle near Monte Cassino. He grew up in South Africa but the family moved to Sussex when he was 11 and he went to Eton. His only ambition was to go to Sandhurst and become an officer in the Royal Scots Greys, but he could not pass his A levels (French and German).

He was attached to the SAS but was sacked after he misused gelignite and detonators and tried to destroy the film set of Dr Dolittle in Castle Combe. He was allowed to stay on in the Royal Scots Greys, however, and did not leave until the last possible moment, in the late Sixties. "I kept on thinking that they would change the rules [about A levels]," he says. "But there is no point in crying over spilt milk. When I found I couldn't - mainly over the exams but the Castle Combe thing probably damped my chances, too - then I had to do something else."

He began a six-month search to find a job in the City. He failed miserably, and he and Ginnie set up Westward Ho Adventure Holidays. This company still exists - though now it is split rather implausibly between expeditions and beef-cattle farming - and he says money remains his main motivation behind his expeditions.

"It is a fact that the origins of it all was to make an income. Then I began to like it very much. I was fascinated by each problem and the knowledge that human beings hadn't solved this particular problem before."

Much of his money is made through books. His passport has said "travel writer" for 29 years. He has also produced two biographies and, looking down at his witchy hand, admits that there may be more of that in the future. But is money really that important to him?

"Well, money has got to be important for a reason. We don't socialise. We don't drink. We don't have smart cars. My last one had 199,000 miles on the same engine. So we don't really have big expenses of that type. But having had many, many years with nothing and no income, we would like to have a security level."

His vocabulary for talking about pain and death is pretty meagre. He talks about "discomfort" when most people would say they were in the grip of an horrific icy hell. I ask him several times about facing death, and finally he says, switching in and out of the first person: "Well, I can remember falling in a crevasse in Antarctica and suddenly remembering that I wasn't attached to anything. We are talking about milliseconds. So are you thinking about death? I think no. You are thinking 'Gosh, this is a very bad predicament and I must do something to get out of it'."

I press on. But what about a few weeks ago, on the ice? Did he think that he could die at any time? "Well, you can do but you shouldn't do if you've been in those circumstances - in the dark, in the cold, with the wind, a heavy sledge. At the end of a normal day you stop and put the tent up. Every movement is a rush to keep the body going until the tent is up and you are inside the tent and heaven is approaching. "You get the cooker started. That has to be done correctly, too! So heaven is when you are in the tent and the cooker is started and you've got a tea. Then it's just wonderful. One lives through the unpleasantness of the day just for that."

Sir Ranulph insists that he leads a "pretty normal life". His greatest achievement is to have been married, and happy with it, for 30 years. But what is his greatest expedition achievement? "Definitely locating the lost city of Ubar. I did eight major expeditions to find it and eventually did in 1991. It was a great moment but frustrating."

Why? "Because, well, perhaps you wouldn't repeat this. I had a base camp from which I had travelled hundreds of miles to look for it and it was actually within 300 yards of the camp."

I laugh.

"I know that sounds a bit stupid," he says.

I disagree.

"It made me think that I had wasted a lot of time."

But isn't it the quest that matters?

"You know, in a way, having found it was a bit disappointing because, then, you couldn't go on looking for it."