Freed BBC journalist returns home

(CNN) -- After four months in captivity in Gaza, BBC journalist Alan Johnston is back home in Scotland, thus ending what he calls "this strange, dark period" of his life.

Johnston, who was the only Western correspondent assigned full time to Gaza, was kidnapped off the street March 12 by the Army of Islam, which showed video clips of him on a Web site in the following months. Johnston was freed July 4 as Hamas pressured the Army of Islam.

Johnston arrived in Argyll on Saturday after a British Airways flight carried him from Israel to Britain.

After touching down in London, the 45-year-old correspondent returned home --- "back in the kitchen with the family, a moment you dream of."

Flanked by family members, Johnston chatted with reporters.

"There just isn't an imaginable contrast greater than this," he said before the backdrop of the "green and calm and cold and wet and beautiful" Argyll hills.

He says he "came to love Gaza in a way as well in the three years that I spent there. It's a tremendously important place to me," he said. But he called the four months in the cell "something else."

"It's like another planet."

Johnston -- who in one video was shown wearing what was described as an explosive vest -- called the ordeal the "psychological battle of my life" but said he was heartened when he actually saw his father's calm and strong demeanor on TV during his captivity.

He also was aware of the "extraordinary support" for him all over the world from radio news.

Johnston said he's going to spend time with his family and take "a couple of months' rest." He said he hasn't "quite worked out where the BBC might fit me in when I get back."

It was peculiar, he indicated, for a newsman to be the object of news. He's looking forward, he told reporters, to getting back "on other side of the microphone." E-mail to a friend