Michael Palin: why I won't sit in a chair and shut up He urged grandparents to try and be adventurous, telling them a "well-planned" journey could "lift your spirits" as you get older and have time to yourself. "I'm 70 now, and I don't think I shall ever stop travelling," he said. It keeps me up to the mark both mentally and physically and the interaction with the rest of the world and the people I meet makes me feel that there is much more that unites us all, than divides us. This is a useful antidote to media stories which might give you the impression that the world is falling apart. It was his curiosity that kept him going, he said, as he had always wanted to know "what was over the next hill or around the next corner." Born and raised in Sheffield in the 1940s and 1950s, the "most exotic" destination he travelled to as a child was Nottingham, he admitted. The way his adult life had panned out had therefore been "the most wonderful realisation of a dream for me," he added. He suggested, however, that his wife of 47 years, Helen, did not altogether share his passion for adventure. When the couple are holidaying together, they tend not to stray too far from their north London home and not do anything "exciting," he said. "My wife is not a great one for climbing mountains and crossing deserts to get to the nearest deckchair," he said. We have some family friends in the Lot Valley in France, and we also try somewhere like Majorca for an end-of-season holiday with the grandsons. So nothing exciting, but that's the pleasure of it. Palin returned to television drama last month after a two-decade hiatus, with a part in The Wipers Times, a one-off BBC drama based on the true story of a satirical newspaper produced in the trenches of the First World War. Although he has shown no signs of retiring to his armchair any time soon, he appears to have one eye on what will happen when he does. He said: "I just hope that the work I do does leave a mark, and doesn't just blow away like the dust."