Not knowing who my family are.

I understand that you lose the register of hearing that enables you to hear crickets, and when I can’t hear crickets in the summer I’ll be really sad.

I’ve been very fortunate in that respect. In the early days I liked to be the bomb of the expedition, and rush on ahead and do things faster than anybody else. Those days merged very pleasantly into periods when I organized and inspired expeditions and selected these younger people who were then the bombs of the operation. And then it drifted into this involvement with the people of the area, still loving the mountains, but finding the people just as important too. And on and on it’s gone. As I get older and less physically capable, I find other challenges have grown up and become just as important to me.

Losing the people that I love.

A teacher and a nightclub singer.

Alan Bates, Lord Arbuthnot and Nick Wallis for exposing the Post Office and Fujitsu and, let’s hope, for ensuring everyone is properly compensated.

To everyone I’ve bored.

Maybe I should have agreed to take the job of controller of BBC One when Bill Cotton offered it to me. I do feel a wimp; I would have been the first woman in the job.What do you consider your greatest achievement? I don’t really claim credit, I hope, for helping to launch Childline and the Silver Line and Silver Stories. It is an achievement that they all exist, but that is down to their amazing teams.

Like intoxication, sometimes followed by a hangover.

When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.