Ten years ago John McCarthy was mapping out his future in a Beirut cell. The cell was just big enough to allow him and his fellow hostage, Brian Keenan, to lie down and sleep. So they created space in their head. Infinite vistas. Fantasy was their sustenance.
Of course, he thought back to the old life before he'd been kidnapped by Islamic Jihad - his family, his girlfriend Jill Morrell, packed working days back at the TV station where he was a producer. But McCarthy and Keenan needed the stimulus of a shared vision. So they read and re-read their knackered old atlas before settling on Patagonia. When they were released they would travel to Chile, buy up a huge swathe of land, and start a yak farm. They worked through the tiniest details - Keenan was a dab hand at DIY, they'd import the yaks from China, flog the steaks and make a fortune.
McCarthy is looking out of the window, discussing the dream with intensity. "We wanted something vast - a farm the size of a county. Given the fact that we were in cramped conditions and under the control of people who didn't respect human rights, we were going to create our own benign mini-state, I suppose."
I ask how real the fantasy was, and he seems surprised by the question. Was it something he thought they would realise? "Oh I see what you mean... It was important in terms of perceiving a future we could look forward to outside captivity." He smiles the gentlest of smiles. "I suppose in your heart of hearts you thought when you get out, there'll be lots of other things to be doing as well."
Despite his robust Radio 4 voice, there is something delicate, almost ghostly about McCarthy. In 1996, he teamed up with Keenan to make that trip to Chile. Now they have written a book about it. They rode horses over desperate ridges, they suffered altitude sickness, reconfirmed their commitment to each other, but they also celebrated their liberty. They never bought the yak farm.
McCarthy was released after five years' detention in 1991, a year after Keenan. His first appearance as a free man was unforgettable, the way he strolled into the chaos of the paparazzi in Damascus, calm as you like. "Well, hello," were his first words. There wasn't a hair out of place. The newspapers called him a very British hero and marvelled at how he could return from hell with a dignity bordering on insouciance.
By the time McCarthy emerged, the unknown TV producer was probably the most famous of the hostages. Jill Morrell had founded a pressure group, Friends of John McCarthy, and conducted an inspired campaign to secure his release - there were McCarthy gigs, McCarthy yellow ribbons, McCarthy vigils, McCarthy badges, McCarthy cinema ads.
It was a heartbreaking story, played for all it was worth. Morrell was a feisty, independent woman who realised she had to present herself as "the girlfriend", the woman who waits, to secure the nation's sympathy. And how it worked. Everyone cried for his fate, everyone wanted Morrell and McCarthy reunited.
Reality was more complex. When he was released he told the world he was just fine, but he wasn't. In 1993, McCarthy and Morrell published their moving account of the hostage years, Some Other Rainbow. In the book, two love stories ran side by side, occasionally clattering into each other. And the symbiotic relationship between McCarthy and Keenan often overwhelmed that between McCarthy and Morrell.
He has often said they were like brothers, but it reads more as if they were living off the same blood supply. "Yeh, you're right. I suppose when we were banged up, we were," he says. "Because everything was exactly the same. We were sleeping in the same bed, eating the same food, wearing identical clothes and reading exactly the same books."
He tells me about the occasion he had given up, not spoken for days, and all he could hear was Keenan and Tom Sutherland firing banal questions at him. "I suddenly became aware of what they were doing. They were talking round the clock just to get me talking again. They were willing optimism back into my body."
McCarthy is mesmerising when he talks about his five years in the darkness. He tells me that in the end, he gained strength from finding out about his mother's death a year later. "What I found most comforting was that she'd died a year ago but throughout that year she'd been there supporting me, just like when she had been alive."
When he was released, a new horror emerged. The reality of old had turned into a fantasy world every bit as alien. "Smile, John!" "Give him a kiss, Jill." "When are you two going to get married then?" The press followed them on holiday to the Caribbean, to their retreat in Wales, everywhere. "Picking up in the real world was much more difficult than I'd imagined," McCarthy says. "I had assumed you'd just come home..." His frame is surprisingly slight. I remember the day he was released, a warrior hero with bulging muscles. Maybe he had worked out, maybe it was our mythology.
"I remember thinking what are they so interested in? Why can't they go away now?" He says he became a "character". People embraced him in the street. At first it was lovely, but before long he found it difficult. "Sometimes people would be very moved, choked up, even crying. I thought I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here. I'm just little John McCarthy, I'm not anything special." But to the public, McCarthy had become a symbol of hope, of triumph in adversity.
I tell him that at the end of Some Other Rainbow, he seemed unbalanced, damaged. "Noooooah," he says emphatically. "That initial edginess wore off within a few months." While the book had an ostensibly optimistic ending - McCarthy and Morrell were living together again - you couldn't help fearing the worst. It seemed so unlike him when he said he couldn't trust friends, that he felt jealous of the way they had carved out careers, sorted out their lives, while he had petrified in Lebanon. When he heard Terry Anderson say John had been the best hostage, he wept and wept and said that meant more to him than anything.
In 1995, McCarthy and Morrell announced they were splitting up. No one's fault, no bitterness, yes they loved each other, but they were no longer in love. When McCarthy was asked about it he became defensive, telling journalists it was not their business. But many people did feel it was their business - they'd been rooting for the couple for so many years, they'd bought the best-selling book, how could they be denied a happy ending?
I ask him whether media pressure led to the split and expect him to tell me to mind my own. He pauses, considering his options. "No. I don't think so. No. No I don't think so. No. If it was going to be that, it would have happened much sooner when the pressure was intense. We worked for a long time on our relationship..."
So when they finished it was like any other couple finishing? "I'm glad you asked that," he says. "Because there was that thing - no wonder they broke up. I mean yes it was a big pressure to be apart under those circumstances for five years, but we were and still are very normal people. And we worked it out as any normal couple might do except it was slightly more in the spotlight. He's talking faster. "We're still in touch. We don't see other a lot, but there's this 'Oh are you still friends?' Well, why the fuck wouldn't we be?" He apologises for banging on, and comes to a stop.
His rehabilitation has been slow and disquieting, but now he feels it is complete. "You know after six months I'd look back and think a few months ago I was fine but now I know I am, then a year on I looked back and thought six months ago I thought I was fine, but now I know I am. It went on till I'd been home five years. I was over in Dublin seeing Brian and I said I suddenly feel as if something has gone, and he said, 'Yeah, a year ago I felt different, special. And that was four years on. I realised I'd been out as long as I'd been in. And now you've been out five years, as long as you've been in.'"
If you were a psychotherapist, you might talk about closure - fulfilling the fantasy of Chile seems to be the last stage in rehabilitation, in reclaiming reality. McCarthy tells me of all the great projects he has got lined up - books, TV programmes, radio. He says he knows he wouldn't have got these opportunities had he not been kidnapped.
Earlier this year he married Anna Ottewill. "Finding the right person and settling down has been wonderful. It's just that idea of being established, another part of your life that is defined." He talks about how fortunate he is, how blessed. He says he no longer feels the past peering over his shoulder.