I have this recurring dream. I am sitting down with a group of friends when one by one they start to stand up. Nobody is paying any attention as I grip a nearby table or chair for support and slowly, unsteadily, pull myself up to a standing position. "Hey look!" I shout, "I'm standing on my own two legs!"

"So you are," they say, or something like that, and we walk out. The sense of relief is overwhelming. In my dream, the nightmare is over. I am not paraplegic after all. The nerves in my spine have somehow miraculously healed and I am "able-bodied" once more. The wheelchair can go to someone who needs it.

But that, I am told, is not going to happen. When the newspapers kindly noticed that I was standing up for the first time to deliver a report on BBC television news in February, it was only because my legs were supported by metal callipers hidden inside my suit trousers. The callipers are essentially a pair of metal rods that run down the outside of each leg, with a lockable hinge at the knee, and four plastic brackets to strap around the thighs and calves. Without these rods, my legs are like jelly or, in the more accurate words of my daughter, "like a raggedy doll's". Wearing the callipers is fine but it also entails lugging around a bulky metal walking frame for support. Without this I would quickly lose my balance and topple over, which nearly happened at a BBC party when an over-enthusiastic senior colleague pinned me ever closer to the wall as she recounted an anecdote.

So just how much of my health and mobility have I clawed back, nearly three years since being shot several times in Saudi Arabia? Well, the human body is truly a remarkable thing. Before my injuries I did not even have a GP but when the medevac helicopter put me down on the roof of the Royal London hospital after the flight from Riyadh, I was a medical basket case. The consultants had every reason to look as worried as they did: after all the internal damage done by multiple gunshot wounds, they wondered if I had enough small bowel left to survive nutritionally. For months I was fed through a tube in my chest as I slept. It was a fiddly, sterile procedure, prone to serious infection, and if I had had to spend the rest of my life like that I would hardly have been able to travel anywhere. But an operation to join up what was left of my intestine was successful and slowly my nutrition has returned to normal.

When I initially emerged from hospital I was prescribed a small pharmacy of pills - 18 a day, and I hate taking pills at the best of times. Mostly they were aimed at trying to slow down my super-fast gut but then one day I decided to stop taking them and I seem to be fine. For months I was on a heavy dose of painkillers - more than 1,000mg a day - for the agonising nerve pains in my legs below the level of injury. I still get plenty of pain but although it sometimes keeps me awake it is manageable now and I have been "clean" and off all regular medication for 18 months.

For the first three months in hospital I could feel nothing below the waist but as my health has recovered so have some of my spinal nerves. Today my paralysis is total only from the knees downwards. I have given the nerves every encouragement with physiotherapy, specifically something called "active assisted physio", which involves lying flat on a bed and pushing hard with my legs against my physiotherapist's shoulder. For some obscure reason I could never get the physios at Stanmore hospital to do this but I firmly believe it has helped what recovery I have had. I don't spend nearly as much time having physio as I should - I am lucky if I can fit in a couple of one-hour sessions a week after work - but when I do, every minute counts. Sometimes Leigh, my physiotherapist, and I will head down to the gym where I work on my upper body with weights, lateral pull-downs and perhaps have a go on the rowing machine. Sometimes we will head for the swimming pool. For me, this has been a revelation. I was never much of a swimmer, preferring running up mountains to gulping a load of chlorine, and I was initially led to believe that I would always need some kind of flotation device round my neck. On holiday this summer I found this was no longer necessary and the freedom of swimming in a pool with my children, unencumbered by a yellow polystyrene yoke has been wonderful.

Then there is scuba diving. I had always loved diving. I loved the sensation of moving underwater in three dimensions so much that when I worked in Bahrain in the 1990s, I took advantage of the warm Gulf seas to take first my Padi (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) basic diving course then the advanced certificate. I must admit I had no idea that you could still dive if you were half paralysed but, last November, a BBC cameraman friend, John Macintyre, persuaded me to be his subject in a 25-minute travel documentary on BBC News 24 entitled The Dive of My Life. With a bit of help from a UK charity called the Scuba Trust, it involved my flying out to Sharm el-Sheikh on the Red Sea with a crew and learning to dive without the use of my legs. All right, so I can move them underwater but the effect is rather like swimming through treacle - it does not propel me anywhere. I was issued with a pair of luminous-green webbed gloves to help me swim breaststroke underwater.

Getting me off the boat and into the sea involved a couple of burly Egyptian boatmen lifting me out of my wheelchair and plonking me down on the stern. There I had to heft the diving kit on to my back, spit into the mask, swill it about, deliver a brief impromptu piece to camera, mask up and roll forward with a push from behind. Plunging into an ocean as deep as the Red Sea is always a thrill - on the Gulf of Aqaba side, the seabed drops steeply away to 1,000m almost immediately and you never quite know what beasties are going to come swimming up from the deep. I am not sure which gave me the most pleasure: being able to move once again through that underwater world or watching the dive instructor certify that I needed no more help underwater than an able-bodied diver.

Since then, I have also tried bob-skiing and quad-biking, not to prove any kind of a point, but simply because I enjoy these sports. The quad-biking gave me the independence to race across the flattened sand valleys of the Sinai desert, while the skiing has allowed me to once again experience the thrill of gliding between larch trees laden with fresh snow, the alpine sun full on my face, and think: this may be hard work but it certainly beats being in hospital.