Sir Ranulph Fiennes explained last week that he reached the summit of Everest by imagining it wasn’t there. He said he was prepared simply to “plod for ever”, never once allowing himself the luxury of thinking about where he was going, what he was doing or whether he was halfway to halfway yet.

In other words, Britain’s greatest adventurer achieved his goal by adopting the mindset of everyone else. “Plodding for ever” is what almost all of us do almost every day. We get up in a morning, we trudge through the day, with no sense of purpose or ambition, and then we die.

Just this morning, after an enormously long time, the lift doors finally opened in my London apartment block to reveal a middle-aged woman who apologised for the eternity I’d been kept waiting. “I like to go up and down in here,” she said. “You sometimes meet quite interesting people.”

So while Sir Ranulph walks from pole to pole, goes to his shed to amputate bits of his body that have become a nuisance, climbs the world’s highest peaks, has a heart operation and then runs seven marathons in seven days on seven continents, we have a woman who amuses herself by going up and down in a lift.

I’m no better. I amuse myself by getting up in a morning, going to Guildford, driving round corners a bit too quickly, while shouting, and then driving home to bury whichever pet has died that day. On Tuesday it was the mouse. Or, to be more accurate, the tumour with a mouse growing out of it.

I envy Ranulph Fiennes. I envy his drive. I envy his questfulness. Certainly, I know for sure that if I were enraged by a big American movie company that dammed a trout stream to make a feature film about talking animals, I’d sit at home and do nothing except write imaginary letters to my MP.

Fiennes, on the other hand, nicked some explosives from the SAS stores and attempted to blow the Americans back from where they’d come.

If I’d got frostbite by trying to retrieve my tent and cooking equipment from the jaws of the Arctic Ocean, I’d whimper and wait for the doctor to work his miracles. Fiennes simply broke out his saw and did the job himself. He did. He cut bits of his own hand off because “it was annoying me”.

The rest of us are so very different. I, for instance, want to learn how to play the piano. But that means buying one, getting someone to bring it round, finding a book full of tunes that I like and that don’t have too many sharps or flats in them . . . and, all things considered, I can’t be bothered.

I want to start collecting butterflies, but that means reading books and buying a net, and, frankly, it’s easier to watch television instead.

There are so many things I want to do, so many ways I want to push my body and expand my mind, but it’s always easier to carry on plodding.

Gardening is a classic case in point. Last year, in a flurry of square-jawed determination to do something worthwhile, I bought a tree. It was delivered on the back of a lorry, in a huge pot, and plonked by the garage. Which is where it sits now because it’s just too much of a faff to move it.

It’s much the same story with my fountain. Three years ago I arranged for a plumber and an electrician to do the groundwork, but then I decided that not finishing it off was easier than finishing it off, so today my back lawn still has an unsightly pipe and some wires poking out of the grass that I really should cut this afternoon. But I won’t because I’ll be too busy watching the Monaco Grand Prix.

Not live, obviously. That would have meant organising tickets and finding a hotel and getting childcare and going to an airport, and, honestly, it’s so much easier to watch it on television. Unless the weather holds, in which case I’ll just stay in a chair in the ruin that could be a garden. But isn’t.

My latest project is bonsai trees. While everyone else at the Chelsea flower show last week mooched about wondering why there were so few shooting invitations this year, I became transfixed by the display of miniature topiary.

The pine trees with their gnarled trunks and wind-blown lean looked exactly like the fully grown examples you might find on a cliff in southern Spain. But they were just a couple of feet tall. The detailing was exquisite. And I found myself swooning in the conjoining of nature’s infinite bounds for beauty and man’s ability to make everything better still.

Bonsai-ists are the same as Yorkshire’s dry-stone wallers, who bring the countryside to life, and the 13th-century cathedral builders, whose vision provides a focal point in our temperate flatlands.

I spoke for a while with a fellow bonsai enthusiast, who explained about how it’s essential to concentrate on the roots rather than the plant you actually see, and how to change the fertiliser and ensure a steady flow of phosphoric acid, and how to prune the leaves and to make sure there is precisely the right amount of sunshine.

And I’m afraid my eyes started to glaze over as I realised it would be much easier to fire up the PlayStation and spend an hour or two shooting my children in the face.

For this reason, I’m never going to build the fantastic train set that exists only in my mind. I’m never going to hang the pictures I haven’t bought yet. And I’m never going to clear Cambodia of landmines. And neither are you, because you’re sitting around reading the papers, same as you did last week and the week before.

I know we can’t all be Ranulph Fiennes. We can’t do everything. But don’t you wish that sometimes you could find the time from the drudge of the humdrum . . . to do something?

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