What’s your earliest memory of travel?
My parents didn't have a car, so all our holidays involved complicated rail trips, carrying stuff in rucksacks and putting on walking boots from an early age. It was youth hostelling in Cardiganshire, Mid Wales at the age of five where I remember first noticing landscapes and how different it all was from London. Then in my early teens I developed a passion for OS maps and ancient Baedeker guides, and wrote a send-up of a Green Michelin Guide to my family's house, complete with star-ratings for the cat, and so on.

How did you get involved with travel professionally?
I got involved with writing up walks for a desperate-sounding pub walks guide called The Drinker's Guide to Walking when a student. Later I worked in Saga Holidays for a stint, resigned and cycled around east Kent researching my own walks leaflets, and subsequently fell into freelancing for Holiday Which?, when I took on producing The Good Walks Guide - and one thing led to another.

When did you join the Guild and what’s the best thing about it?
2002, after several unnecessary years of dithering. The meetings are nearly always hugely worthwhile - I've met more than half of the membership, and it's been really good to realise I'm not the only one doing this often rather surreal job. And although I never thought I would be a committee bod, I've really got a lot out of being on committee - lots of management issues and joint decision-making of a type that's easy to miss out on when working by oneself.

What’s your best travel experience?
Walking with my wife Anne over the Dolomites in 1993, hut to hut, over what looked like impossible Narnian landscapes, but stretching ourselves and finding that even the snowfield over the Sella was within our abilities. I've always hankered after mountains, and try to get to something high and snow-covered each year, accompanied either by walking boots or cross-country skis.

What’s your most bizarre?
At the Three Pagodas Pass, I wandered over from Thailand into a godforsaken Burmese village, where a young soldier spotted my tatty M&S shirt and generously asked me to swap his Second World War British-issue rifle for it. This was a tempting offer, but wandering back to the bus, shirtless but ludicrously armed past the border guard might just have aroused one or two suspicions.

What do you never leave home without?
Earplugs. Even many top hotels seem to have a strange buzzing that's just enough to keep you awake. Lesser places have burping plumbing systems that go 'gloop, gloop' all night. And in Naples someone gets up at 4am and sets up special car-crushing machines outside windows of anywhere someone might happen to be sleeping: even earplugs aren't terribly good against those.

What’s the best thing about being professionally involved in travel?
Being able to say exactly what you think about a place. Unfortunately it's not always like that, but I think the best travel writing is when it's completely uninhibited.

Who or what would you like to be in the next life?
Actually I'd like to go back in time - Restoration London or Regency England - periods when culture and innovation were blooming. Also would love to have a peek inside the Crystal Palace to see what the place actually felt like. I'm not bothered about being some kind of celeb - just comfortably off, and steering clear of nasty diseases.

Where would you never want to go to again?
Pretty much every major European tourist city in high summer. I think winter is a much better time for seeing them and really getting the atmosphere.

Who do you most admire?
In the travel world, those who've stuck to some kind of impossible-sounding goal, and achieved it - so I'd go for Nikolaus Pevsner, who recorded every building of architectural note in dozens of English counties, and left us with some of the most astonishingly detailed guidebooks of all time.

Future plans and ambitions?
I've recently worked as a consultant on sustainable tourism projects for public bodies, and felt very much that responsible travel is the direction things will go in the future. I also have a particular history-themed guidebook I'm developing and hoping to find the right publisher, one that gives me enough freedom to develop my own angle – it's a familiar subject but a new approach.