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The man who cheated death on a mountain isn’t going to pander to anyone’s expectations about how loneliness has eaten into his soul. That much is clear the moment you enter Joe Simpson’s sunny cottage on a hill outside Sheffield. There are decorative hearts hanging from the ceiling and strings of star lights lacing a conservatory that looks onto a snug, romantic garden with a bridge over a stream. The touch of a woman is intriguingly apparent – in ecclesiastical quantities of ivory candles and little sculptures of cats.

Brooding? Introspective? Too dedicated to the dangerous and solitary pursuit of high-altitude climbing to form a permanent relationship? The myths about the abrasive author of Touching the Void vanish like vapour off a snow peak in the sun.

The man himself is cheerful, lean and quick moving, despite multiple injuries he has sustained over years of falling on and off mountains. He is fussing over two cats, one thin, one obese, who were part of the package when his girlfriend, Corrinne , moved in with him. Though he has had other relationships, for the first time in his 51 years he is sharing domestic space with a woman and it sounds as though he is still utterly, pleasantly discombobulated.

“She seems to think it’s perfectly normal,” he says. “It’s been a bit of a flipping rollercoaster for me. I feel I’ve been eviscerated, actually.”

Her name is Simpson (“pretty neat, isn’t it?”), a beauty therapist from Derbyshire. They met a long time ago – “ships that pass in the night sort of thing” – and got together three years ago. It wasn’t mountaineering that stopped him from forming this kind of closeness before, he says, but “probably because I am a pretty gnarly, selfish b-----anyway. I don’t think I’m a very easy person to be with. But yeah, I think I must have mellowed a bit. I would not like to have met the person I was in my twenties. Very unpleasant, very driven.”

Neither of them has children. In his case, because he really doesn’t like them and was so certain of his unsuitability for fatherhood that he had “the snip” eight years ago. “I didn’t want to be shackled to a child because I would have felt morally bound to bring up a child as well, if not better, than my parents brought me up. I wouldn’t be able to fanny around the world nearly killing myself. I had friends who went climbing and had children and they didn’t seem to have any problem with that. I’m not having a go at them. The world wouldn’t carry on without children, but I don’t want any of my bloody own, thanks.”

Without children, he says he “couldn’t entirely see the point of marriage”, but there’s been a slight but interesting shift. “I do sort of see it now.”

On most topics, Simpson is blunt, fluent and proud of it. Climbing, he says, forces you to be direct and honest “because when you’re scared, you’re scared. End of.” Therapy is for wimps. The education system stifles real learning. His cynical view of the anniversary programmes about 9/11 is that if the Twin Towers had not been photogenic, we would not have been “stewing” in hours of commemorative television.

Over-memorialising makes him queasy. “There are some people who will be screwed up for the rest of their lives that they survived instead of just being grateful and moving on. These memorials make that worse.”

The great paradox with Joe Simpson is that, although he believes passionately in moving on, his whole livelihood – the bestselling books, the soul-scouring film, the inspirational public speaking – springs from one terrible thing that happened to him on a mountain in the Andes more than a quarter of a century ago.

He shattered his leg in a fall on the 21,000ft Siula Grande in 1985 and his exhausted climbing partner, Simon Yates, who had struggled for 12 hours to save him and was himself slipping over a precipice, cut the rope that connected them. Simpson fell to what seemed certain death but, four days later, Lazarus-like, clawed his way back to base camp. His unsparing account, Touching the Void, was written largely to counter the misplaced criticism of Yates. It changed both them and mountaineering literature for good.

The gripping fable became a double-edged sword, Simpson says. “The great thing was that I discovered that I could write. The bad side was that Simon and I are almost locked in the past. Simon is always the guy who cut the rope and I am always the bloke who crawled home.

“People get highly emotional and irrational about the cutting of the rope. Simon did more than anybody could possibly have been asked to do to save someone’s life. Everybody misses that crucial point. He took a very pragmatic decision. He wasn’t to know I went down a crevasse. He wasn’t cutting a rope to kill me; he was cutting a rope to save himself. Then, not having died, initially he beat himself up about it. There’s a lot of guilt in surviving things and it’s irrational.”

Simpson maintains that neither of them could understand the “strong frisson of shock” in the climbing community. They could have let it screw them up but they simply analysed what went wrong, became better mountaineers and “just got on with it”. He has a favourite Tibetan saying, ge garne. “It crudely translates as 's--- happens’. You just get on.”

Simpson got on with being very famous. Yates slightly less so. They both went on many more climbs together but Yates, married with two children, now lives in the Lake District, with his own guiding and trekking business. Simpson has retired from climbing. They are no longer in touch. When they collaborated on the film of Touching the Void in 2003, they had not seen one another for 10 years. “It’s not that we’ve stopped being friends, just that we moved apart.”

Simpson has just written his seventh book, The Sound of Gravity, a novel in which a young climber loses his wife on a hostile mountain. She slips from his grasp and falls to her death in a crevasse. He almost perishes in the search for her (Simpson at his poetic best describing the limits of human endurance in a white hell) and, consumed by guilt, keeps a vigil on the mountain for 25 years.

Simpson’s publishers say it is his most “commercial” book, by which they seem to mean it has a rather good extended sex scene, but in many respects it is the familiar Simpsonian territory of guilt, survival and loss against a background of elemental terror and beauty.

“I don’t think I’ll ever write endearingly cheerful novels,” he admits. “I like the poignancy and pathos. I’m a bit Russian like that.”

Some of the most terrifying and ghoulish scenes are based on his own climbing experiences but any suggestion that he might still be looking back, working out his own angst, is dismissed. “I found myself getting quite annoyed with Patrick [his main character]. I wanted to shake him. I was thinking: for God’s sake, pull yourself together, man. Get over it. You’re ruining your life here. The truth is, she died to save you, you stupid eejiit. Ge garne. Just get on.”

Like his father, who fought the Japanese in Burma with the Gurkhas, Simpson is disdainful of people who can’t work their own way out of “bad stuff” and seek counselling. “We don’t seem to appreciate just how powerfully equipped human beings are to deal with this stuff. We are almost trying to make ourselves soft.”

Both his parents lived to see him turn his near-death experience into personal triumph, but his Irish mother seems never to have changed her belief that mountaineering was an essentially selfish thing to do. A Kerry woman, she had brought her youngest son up to be a good Catholic but he stopped believing in God when he was 15. None the less, she was shocked when he told her, quite brutally, that when he was in the crevasse, staring death in the face, he did not utter a single prayer.

“I always worried that if everything hit the fan, I might renege and say a few Hail Marys,” Simpson smiles. “But that is the point of Touching the Void. I was 25, fit, strong, ambitious, crippled and stuck in a place I was going to die and there was no Heaven and no Father… nothing. When I got back, I told my ma this and she went mad. She’d been getting masses said for me. I honestly believe that if I had started praying, I would have given up and gone to meet my maker.”

Has he any idea what he put her through?

“No. But that’s what sons are for, isn’t it?”

Other high-level climbers, he says, used to tell their parents they’d gone hill walking when they were on the north face of the Eiger. Simpson was scrupulously honest with his. “I told them everything. I told them about the deaths and the accidents. Mountaineering is a very selfish thing to do, a very difficult thing. I tried to tell them: This is my passion. This is life-enhancing. It defines me. It isn’t just climbing a silly hill and getting killed in a stupid way.”

And to hear him suddenly break off to describe the diamond beauty of the stars at 20,000ft, or his wonderment at discovering a fossil which was once at the bottom of the sea but is now petrified on the roof of the world, is to realise that climbing mountains was never a sport for him but a necessity, with its own spiritual dimension.

Ever the mover-on, he says his next book will not be about mountaineering; he wants to step away from “the comfort of the climbing world”. I don’t think he has any idea how bizarre, or improbable, that sounds.