Simon Yates - Pleasure and Pain

Simon Yates returns to The Guildhall on Saturday 5 December, with his new talk Pleasure and Pain. If the name rings a bell, it's likely from Touching the Void — the book and film that made him a household name. He's now in his sixties, a veteran of more than eighty expeditions to some of the highest and most remote mountains on the planet, and this talk draws on the last decade of adventures, with summits in South America, Central Asia and the Himalayas.

One of the stories he'll be telling comes from 2023, when he travelled with fellow British mountaineer Mick Fowler to attempt the unclimbed north face of Patkhor in Tajikistan. It didn't go to plan: the pair both contracted food poisoning, ran out of food and were forced back below the summit by a storm. On the descent, Yates took a bone-breaking 100m fall. After two days on the glacier waiting for a helicopter, he had to walk three days to safety. That's the kind of thing he'll be talking through — the highs and the lows of a life spent in the mountains.

The talk is part of the city's Talks & Lectures series, so it sits alongside other speakers throughout the season. It starts at 7:30pm at The Guildhall, Guildhall Square, SP1 1JH, with tickets from £18.