Spencer Matthews

Of course, yeah, a pleasure.

Michael was 12 years older than me.

He was 22 at the time of his death, and he was the youngest Brit to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which is a stat that he wouldn't have cared about, but I like saying it.

You know, very difficult for me to have a full character assessment of him being 10, but as I understand it, he was a very modest, kind...

Not quiet, but probably a fair amount more reserved than me, but a very beautiful soul, good-looking young man, very successful in his own right early on, just very good at anything he did.

And on all counts, quite a special boy, I suppose we should call him, you know, 22.

You know, there were unusual circumstances surrounding his death.

I think it's fair to say we certainly felt for a long time, although we were never able to prove anything, that his death could have absolutely been avoided.

And the only reason we...

would ever think anything like that was just the sheer amount of people that told us that who were there.

We're not the kind of family to seek justice or revenge for an accident.

You know, obviously climbing Everest is a very difficult thing to do.

um you are risking your life and had it just felt like a mistake on his part or an accident that would have been the end of it but it wasn't it it was you know that there was certainly you know many reports of um things being done in a way that the where his death could have been avoided you know problems with the oxygen tanks not enough oxygen on the mountain blah blah blah

So, you know, I kind of grew up, obviously not at the age of 10, but, you know, by the time I hit 15 or was old enough to drink regularly, I absolutely did.

And nobody ever forced me to drink and took me a while to actually couple the two things together.

You know, I'd spoken to some therapists who absolutely believe that my excessive drinking could have been

certainly in part due to trauma suffered at a young age and not processing it.

I was always slightly uncomfortable with coupling those two things together because I enjoyed drinking to excess.

Nobody held a gun to my head and I wasn't always thinking about Michael and the potential injustice of, is injustice a word?

Yeah, I suppose you know what I mean, of the situation.