Fitness had always been a major obsession in a life that was full of obsessions.

Even as a teenager I had been mad about being fit. I had run every morning on the hills above Lambourn, trying to beat the horses as they chased me along the lush grass, training gallops.

Army life, especially that of the infantry officer at war, was a strange mix of lengthy, boring interludes punctuated by brief but intensely high-adrenaline episodes where the separation between living and dying could be rice-paper thin. With the episode over, if one was still alive and intact, the boredom would recommence until the next "contact" broke the spell once more.

I had always used the boring times to work on my fitness, constantly trying to break my own record for the number of sit-ups, or push-ups, or pull-ups, or anything-else-ups I could think of, all within a five-minute period. What the Taliban had thought of their enemy chinning it up and down in full body armor, plus rifle and helmet, on an improvised bar welded across the back of a Snatch Land Rover is anyone's guess, but I had been shot at twice while trying to break the battalion record, once when I was on track to succeed. The Taliban obviously had no sense of sport, or of timing.

But now look at me: taking the escalator, and placing my bag down on the moving stairway while doing so. Months of sedentary hospital life had left my muscles weak, flabby and lacking any sort of condition. I clearly had much to do before I had any hope of convincing the major from the MOD that I could be "combatready" once more.

I stood at the bottom of the steep driveway to my mother's home and experienced the same reluctance to go up that I had so often felt in the past.

I had taken a taxi from Newbury station to Lambourn, purposely asking the driver to drop me some way along the road from my mother's gate so that I could walk the last hundred yards.