For a man with a $1million bounty on his head – wanted "dead or alive" by the Syrian regime – Paul Conroy is pretty relaxed.
Last year the Sunday Times photographer was smuggled out of the besieged city of Homs following a missile attack on a makeshift press centre that killed his friends, veteran correspondent Marie Colvin and French photographer Remi Ochlik.
The former soldier was lucky to make it out of the ruined district of Baba Amra alive, after a blast which ripped a gaping hole the size of a fist in his leg and left him peppered with shrapnel.
Coverage of the deadly attack and dramatic escape propelled him to worldwide fame – he was recently named among the 100 most influential people in the world, alongside luminaries such as Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon.
Now, 17 months and a gruelling 19 operations later, with a book under his belt and film companies bidding for the movie rights to his dramatic escape, he is restless and itching to get back to work.
The only question, he tells me, in his cottage in a sleepy village not far from Exeter, is whether he is up to the tough physical demands of life as a war photographer.
"The leg's not perfect. I can go in straight lines but it's a big 'if' as to whether I can do it," he says.
"Kneeling down and getting up is hard, so is running and certainly running with camera kit when people are shooting at you. If I go out and I am not 100% and able to keep up with someone and they have to stop and something happens then that's a lot to put on people.
"It sounds terrible but I have got over what happened, I don't have any nightmares. I have got it out through the book. I have analysed it. We had a lot of bad luck. You have got to understand if you do this stuff long enough at one time or another your luck is going to run out. I am a great believer that lightning doesn't strike twice."
A naturally restless type, Paul used the four months he was recovering, partly spent in a plush Sunday Times apartment overlooking the Thames, to write the book, Under The Wire, which is dedicated to the legendary Colvin, a veteran American reporter known for her uncompromising style as her distinctive eye patch.
For five hours each day, when the pain had eased and the morphine wasn't too strong to dull his senses, he recalled the events of February 2012 – a fitting tribute to the last assignment of his great friend who was assassinated by the brutal Assad regime in a cynical attempt to silence media reports of a massacre against the civilian population.
He describes the pair's adventures in less than romantic terms – "essentially a pair of tramps with a bag of money just blagging our way through" – but shrugs off the cliché of the war correspondent as adrenaline junkie.
What drives him is a burning desire to get out the stories that matter. He adds: "We tell the story to make the world sit up and pay attention. But I don't like getting shot at, it's really not very nice. And not when you are getting shelled. That is just pure luck, you're no different to the guys next to you and they are falling like flies.
"There's an adrenaline buzz to creeping across a border at night, past army checkpoints or going through mine fields, but that goes out of the window when people are shooting at you, it just becomes about preservation. There's the challenge of getting in but once you get there you know you are going to find the stories you love to tell. Working with Marie, she wouldn't stop, she wanted to go further."
Paul and Marie had a bad feeling about the Homs trip. And such was the ferocity of the aerial attacks that they thought they may not survive long enough to get the story out. They decided to broadcast live from the ruins – CNN, BBC world and Channel 4 – and six hours later shells began to fall on the Press Centre. Paul's military training told him it was no co-incidence.
"I heard two rockets, 150metres each side of us. Then 30 seconds later two more 50m either side. I was a target locator in the Royal Artillery so I though "they are bracketing on the building". And almost as I had the thought the first missile hit the back of the house. It was far too clinical, too direct to have been just part of the bombardment. There was no doubt in anybody's mind it was time to take out the media.
So how did it feel to have become the target?
"It changes when it's personal. You kind of accept that there are stray bullets when you are running around the battlefield. I do think about it, that they actually sat there and thought: "Kill them!" To them it was part of the war and we were as much the enemy as the Free Syrian Army."
After a spell in the army in the 1980s, Paul was working in the Liverpool studio of playwright and film-maker Willy Russell, of Educating Rita and Blood Brothers fame.
Then a chance to ride down to the Balkans with an aid convoy saw him drawn into conflict reporting.
He explains the fascination which draws so many to return, despite the daily horrors: "There's an edge to it. It is kind of fantasy zone where you leave all this nice, comfy stuff behind and everything is stripped back to the bare bones and you survive on a two cups of coffee a day a piece of stale bread and an old cheese triangle. Everything goes out of the window and you just focus on one thing – there's an energy in a war zone, an attack can be complete chaos, and to be in the middle of that with a camera, trying to make sense of it capture the right image is a challenge which I love, but you also get the freedom to do pretty much what you want. Especially in these rebellions, where there is nobody pulling the big strings, these guys are living by the minute and it's attractive to some people. It is the antithesis to a nice, systematic, organised life, but I like it."
As a father of three boys, he says you have to separate yourself – "there's a danger to put your own kids faces on the kids out there" – but there is no way to shut out the suffering.
"The worst thing I ever had to do was when a woman came up to me with a shrapnel-ridden baby. She was trying to give it to me saying "fix this". A woman gone crazy from shelling and death, wondering why nobody is doing anything instead than taking photographs. She told me "make this better… where are you? When are you coming to help?" I had to explain – we are just there to tell the story. You do just feel like a bit of a vulture taking these pictures. She said "the world knows now" and you find yourself making excuses but excuses are not worth anything."
He is happy to be back in Devon for now, writing and working for Amnesty International and Oxfam, and negotiating a potential film deal, involving some big names.
He doesn't expect go back to Syria: "There's not another photograph I can take that can tell the story any better, plus there's $1 million on my head – dead or alive."
But he won't be hanging up his flak-jacket any time soon. "My dad got it right when asked 'do you think this will stop him?' 'You will have to nail him to the kitchen table to stop him,' he said."
