Out of bed and back in the game

He stands up and walks across the room, heading for the kitchen to make a cup of tea. It's one of the more prosaic journeys of life, little achievement attached, precious little glamour, but for Ryan Hatch it's the sort of everyday event he's been looking forward to for more than seven weeks.

It provokes a twang of conscience that perhaps your correspondent should not really be allowing someone fresh off the sickbed to fetch cups of tea, but Hatch is too quick off the mark for protest. He returns after a few minutes, puts the mug on the table next to a sheet of A4 headed 'Discharge Papers'. Such a juxtaposition says it all; Hatch is home again.

"I can't tell you how good it is to be back home, it felt like a very long time that I was away," he says, with feeling. "It's the happiest I've been in a good while. Just to walk through the front door, just to be back in my own bed, just to sit back and relax at last. You can get quite down, you know."