‘I thought: This is it.

we meet in a west London cafe. “I thought of my daughters, my girlfriend, my family. And then – bang. The noise and wind was incredible.”

All around the camp, debris destroyed whatever it encountered. Tent poles were sent into the air like rocket-powered spears, skewering whatever they landed on. Rocks flew like bullets – one passed straight through a nearby climber, who was also huddling under canvas, killing him instantly. Jules’s tent began filling to the brim with snow.

“It just kept coming in, covering everything. When it passed, I managed to heave myself up, then scrambled around, digging like a madman and not looking outside yet. For some reason I was most concerned about recovering my phone and laptop. It Top: Jules Mountain on Everest, which he returned to conquer a year after the avalanche. Left: With his daughters Lizzie, 11, and Steph, 13, at home in Hertfordshire sounds ridiculous, but you don’t know what to do in those situations.”

Jules – whose surname is coincidental – was one of the lucky ones. The heaviest debris passed just to the side of his expedition’s tents, avoiding his fellow climbers but clattering through support structures. Others either side weren’t so fortunate. Together with its numerous aftershocks, the Nepal earthquake of April 2015 claimed nearly 9,000 lives, costing the small country almost half its GDP and leaving the capital, Kathmandu, still in disrepair. Of those fatalities, 22 came in the avalanche on Mount Everest, including several foreign climbers, and most occurred at Base Camp. It was the deadliest human disaster in Everest’s history.

At 6ft 3ins, broad-shouldered Jules, a company director who lives with his two daughters from a previous marriage, Steph, 13, and Lizzie, 11, on a small farm in Hertfordshire, has a stoic air. In his book about his experience on Everest and life building up to it, he details the absurd number of times he has come close to death. There was the hepatitis A in his thirties; then liver failure; then a bad motorcycle crash; then Everest. “Too many times,” he says, with a dark laugh. “It’s really unbelievable.”

It was his closest brush with death that inspired him to tackle Everest.

In 2007, after selling his consultancy business, an itch behind his ear turned out to be a lump. After a visit to a head and neck consultant, the lump was diagnosed as a malignant tumour. It was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

“They operated a week after, for seven and a half hours,” he says, turning his head to show a large dent and scar. “They had to cut in and move my jaw to get to it. My daughters were three and one at the time. I was petrified.”

After several rounds of chemotherapy, Jules began to recover and felt desperate to prove the treatments hadn’t left him weaker. A keen adventurer, and a leader with the Ski Club of Great Britain, he signed up to do the Haute Route, a famous ski tour in the Alps, despite being unable to feel one side of his head (even today, he has no sensation in his right ear).

“I was determined to do a challenge of some kind and test myself, to show I hadn’t been diminished by the illness. I was proving it to myself as much as anyone else.”

Escalating those challenges, he later climbed Mount Blanc, and then, a few seasons later, had the opportunity of Everest dangled before him when a friend offered him a spare place on a 2015 expedition.

“I felt a tingle through me when he said it. I was hesitant because of my daughters, but I couldn’t think of a real