On our last night in Kabul I was sitting alone in a teahouse, writing up my notes, when a man came over and joined me at my table. We talked for a while and I gathered he was suggesting I should come to his house and drink some whisky. I accepted with pleasure.

His chauffeur was outside. Feeling a bit uneasy, I got in. My feeling of uneasiness increased when we drove at speed into the mountains outside the city.

I was younger and thinner then and possibly blonder, too. It didn’t take me long to realise what the man had in mind so I did the only thing I could think of. I pretended to be violently sick. The car stopped. The man got out. I hit him hard on the jaw. It wasn’t a good blow, more of a haymaker than anything else. I bruised my right thumb badly and to this day it still has a swollen appearance.

Seconds later I had to throw myself off the road into a ditch as the car roared past.

After we had returned to England, Tim and I were interviewed for the BBC’s Home Service by Peter Fleming, a world-renowned explorer who had searched for Colonel Fawcett in the Amazon and had travelled in Tartary with only a camel for company.

Fleming turned to me towards the end of our time on air: “Tell me, Stanley, what was the worst thing that happened to you during your journey in the steps of Marco Polo?”

I wanted to say that I had almost been buggered by an Afghan, but then I thought of all the little old ladies glued to their wirelesses.

“I was kidnapped one evening in Kabul,” I replied. “They wanted to steal my British passport.”

“Would that have been worth a lot?” “About £100 on the black market. Maybe more.”

When we were having a drink afterwards in the BBC’s hospitality room, I told the great explorer that, as far as the passport story was concerned, I had been – as Robert, now Lord, Armstrong would later put it – “economical with the truth”.

“Quite right,” Fleming said briskly. “You should never shock your audience. Bad manners.”

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