On the morning of Margaret Thatcher's funeral, I awoke a little broken. I didn't awake "to find myself" a little broken – that took two days, and several bouts of vicious denial, to realise. I just couldn't properly use my right arm.

I put it down to having slept too heavily on the arm. Yet something was off. I seesaw-grunted out of bed at 8.30am and had a bird bath, soaping mainly the naughty bits, for I was in a hurry that Wednesday: it was the day I filed my Observer TV review. About 1,500 words to do by 2pm, two hours max for rethinks. I dressed, all the while a little conscious of how my hand wasn't still doing quite the things it wanted to do, particularly when it came to the zip and the shirt buttons – infuriating, and I left them half-done. I yawned, shook my head, still obviously just short of the first of the morning jags of coffee. That was when it became interesting.

The arm, the hand, simply wouldn't make coffee. I actually giggled, albeit laconically. I went to fill, from the cold tap in the kitchen, the glass percolator, and my cuffs (now I come to think about it, they had been a real bugger) managed to catch two plates from the night before and send them, breaking, to the floor. I was rubber man, seven-leagues-boots boy: my right arm could, for all I knew, have managed to snag every twitch of crockery and jibble of condiment in sight other than the correct ones. I concentrated, with my left hand and some faint nagging worries, on getting java bubbling. I took the seven steps to the computer and powered up.

That was pretty much when I realised that something was very wrong with me, though it took two whole days to acknowledge it.

Once I've got the intro, which that Wednesday I'd managed to do the night before, I can write relatively quickly, though lying editors might disagree. Which explains my bemusement over the fact that, at noon, I was still staring at the intro. My hands – hand – simply wouldn't work, and it wasn't just in a slipping-off-keys manner, which would be at least understandable given the amount of ash I'd spilt on my keyboard down the years. No, I was misrepresenting "so" as "of", "my" as "to", "in" as "by", "as" as, once, interestingly, "proot" (go figure?) and the rest, and wasting a ludicrous amount of time backspacing. By 2pm I had written 160 words, none of them good, and was reluctantly admitting to myself that I hadn't, actually, "slept heavily on my arm". I had, more, "had a  stroke".

Still, I reckoned, I needed to file. I had coffee, but I'd run out of cigarettes. I wandered down to the local shop, and mumbled something about cigarettes, and was served: it wasn't until a day or two later that I realised my speech had become a bit buggered-about-with as well. But the chaps in my Hove shop are used to dealing with many, many people who can't speak English (most of them assuredly at least seventh-generation British). Had to file, had to file, but I couldn't – a fierce domineering fatigue had taken hold of every limb, and I went to sleep at 5pm and slept the livelong dream-free night, hoping the morning would bring difference.

Hardly. Problem shower, problem coffee. My brain still worked clearly. Ish. I still knew never to use the word "impact" as a verb, and how to spell Dag Hammarskjöld, and how to wipe my arse, though I was currently doing that with an awkwardly different hand. But I simply couldn't form coherent critical thoughts – rather, I could, but by the time I'd typed them 10 minutes had gone by and I was fatigued again.

Three pm, and I needed to make two telephone calls. Fraught only because I had tried to speak, to myself, earlier that morning, and hadn't been too unstutteringly successful. I was still trying to convince myself I was essentially fine. I had a long-standing engagement in Gordon's Wine Bar that Thursday with friends from the Aberdeen journalist strike of 1989, and phoned the closest of them, Duncan Macpherson. He thought, at first – for about four seconds – that I was just trying to get out of it, and then his ever-laconic Inverness accent roused itself to something above gravel.

"What's wrong?" "I think," I stuttered… "I think I've had a  stroke." There it was: said. He paused for a good 20 seconds. "If even you think you've had a stroke, you've had a stroke. I'm calling an ambulance to Hove. What's your address? I'm also calling Fiona [a doctor in Glasgow, a mutual friend]. I need you to call me when the ambulance gets there, and keep me in very close touch." I stuttered something about apologising to Frank and Ben, and he told me to shut up. I came off the phone and, for the first time, wept. It had been acknowledged.

Next call was to Sarah, my editor. As before, it took her about four seconds. "Get the chuff to hospital," although she didn't say "chuff". She was unutterably understanding. The point is this. Denial is absurdly selfish (and yet the best selfishness is yet to come). As soon as I'd made contact with the outside world, as soon as that ambulance arrived, I realised what a thorough div I'd been. Selfishly, under the guise of a faint notion of "independence", I had so manfully been in denial – and thus set everything back.

The acronym Fast (Face, Arms, Speech, Time), adopted by the NHS for stroke warnings, could hardly have been better undermined than by me, other than were it to signify Faffingly Arrogant Selfish Tit. By delaying the urgent need for attention for, effectively, two days, I had made the medics' eyes roll and their jobs considerably harder, messed my newspaper about, shocked a few friends and, probably the least of it, more than possibly set my recovery back. And almost died. One in five strokes in the UK is fatal. I had been very, very stupid.

Things I've learned since. One: no job on earth – not even my desperately important one of concocting a series of snarky comments about people who have been making television with commitment (though a full 15% of it is, as it happens, woeful dreck) – no job is worth dying for, even if you're on deadline. Two: there is an astonishing number of people who live alone today. There has been a 40% rise since the early 70s: then, just 5% lived wholly alone, and today the figure has trebled. Many yadda-yadda reasons for this of course, and I won't bore you, but the outcomes have had slow yet far-reaching consequences, many of them not good. We are social animals, surely, and, though lives may have been relatively mundane (for which sometimes read stultifying) back pre-70s, when we traditionally met, within the same postal district, the ever-same dysfunctional relatives three nights a week to… fold knitted paper or imitate the cry of the ibis or some such, at least someone would have been able to tell when you'd had a stroke.

I only happen to live alone because I don't have a lady-friend at the moment; there were many passionately close live-ins but also a couple of recent disasters, the two categorisations not at all mutually exclusive. I reddened and fled to Hove, to see the sea, and be single for a while, and to smoke, in a nice flat. I never even thought that a stroke would get me – but worse, I hadn't considered the consequences of simply being alone, on the morning it happened, and having no one to tell me, simply: "Stupid man. You've had a stroke, you bozo. Stop working. Get thee to a Nambulance."

Anyway, I got me to a nambulance, with Fiona's (doctor, Glasgow, perennial mobile calls, wise and wicked) prompting, and found, at the Royal Sussex, that I had indeed had a stroke. Not the nastiest, but far from the nicest. My discharge notes from that weekend say, baldly: "2 to 7 day history (numpty) [my parentheses] of dysarthria and right-arm weakness… MRA head showed acute infarcts in left MCA territory… carotid doppler showed a 70% stenosis in the left ICA." I was scheduled for an op, on the following Thursday, and allowed, with cloying reluctance, to go home.

I still wanted to deny. I still thought I could block out the world, retain an inviolacy. A wee operation – pah. I could walk, for ages. Nothing was wrong with me. With absurd luck, my face hadn't fallen or changed. A little scheduled op. But first, I knew, I had to telephone my parents. Truth was I felt guilty, embarrassed: I'd had a bloody stroke, for shame. So I didn't telephone them until six days later, after being thus urged during a stammering, tearful phone call to my brother (he weeps easily). It gave them little time, selfishly, to arrive at the hospital before my op. Of course they and my brother Don, despite my stuttered imprecations, drove through the night from Edinburgh.

That Thursday I had a three-hour carotid endarterectomy (woozily conscious throughout, anaesthetised in the just-so right places: they want you to be able to tell them if you think you're going a bit… unblooded, or frankly, tootsie). This op, for the surgeon, involves severing the carotid, one of the "quite important" links in the neck between the body and the brain, and then somehow, festooned in a fair spray of arterial blood, cleaning out the smoke-gunge from the carotid and shovelling the carotid back in. Yet still, for the patient it isn't quite the gigglefest it sounds. For the full three hours I was mouthing the whispered words of Steve Buscemi in Armageddon , while a colonel attempts, in space, to find the right blue-red wires to defuse a thermonuclear weapon: "Do a good job. Do a good job."

Mr Mike Brooks did a phenomenal job. Afterwards, this dear man advised me only to a) invest in a decent electric razor, in order to not rip away the carotid scar, and b) stop smoking. Forever. Fine to both.

I sent my parents and brother away from Brighton. They were all supremely unconvinced; I was stubborn. Convinced I was grand. I wasn't.

For the first couple of weeks, at least, I coped but noticed I'd become absurdly sentimental, wobbling with trembled lip between tears and anger. I cried at 60 Minute Makeover, fer crissakes. I awoke at bizarre times to find the radio (I always have the radio on all night, which perhaps explains some girlfriends' lack of long-term enthusiasm) reporting some atrocity, and found myself thumping my bedside table in anger. I broke two lamps. In the mornings, I grew to loathe cold calls with a passion.

One kind morning I got myself to a meeting with a marvellous occupational therapist, Nicky deCourcy, who stolidly laid out a few facts, among them the detail that I wouldn't be able to cope for a while with more than two extraneous interventions – quiet TV plus reading, say, or radio plus writing – and that sudden urgent sounds would send me, in the medical terminology, a bit wacko. But it would get better, as long as the fatigue didn't overwhelm: my whole brain was reaching out to gather new useful neurons, and that was a pretty much overwhelmingly fatiguing process. There was nothing wrong with my arm or hands, merely with the brain sending them their messages. I simply had to allow my synapses to relearn different routes.

She asked if I could cope on my own, and I insisted yes. I may, in my dumb sauntering stoicism, have mentioned the words "pshaw" or "phooey".

Good friends visited, but found I couldn't much cope with more than two hours of speech. And soon I had to take stock and admit some things to myself. Such as: the flat was a yakhole and I couldn't do much about it without some help. I had cooked, sometimes, with difficulty, yet woke one day to find I had somehow assembled a bizarre array of crockery on my floor, like a gnomes' tea party but with much scurf; I daily grew too fatigued to lift things and spent increasing hours abed. I had also taken that day, on my landline, no fewer than seven cold calls, each one leaving me shivering with resentment at its screeching greedy randomness. I hadn't taken much notice of them in the years before, other than vowing unspecific homicide, but they were – every stressy interjection was now – specifically designed to fatigue me. One caller, angered at my stuttered insistence on procuring any vague details for his "respected Birmingham law firm", actually ended with the words: "Then fuck you, Ferguson". I wasn't, basically, coping. I needed – big gulp – help.

I called my parents, asked them to come down and make me better. They couldn't have been more willing. Interestingly, that very week, I was rehospitalised with a savage burst of pancreatitis, a pain I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy – my body was, after 50 glorious years, simply falling to bits – and was thus spared the ignominy, theirs and mine, of watching two 78-year-olds, one with two stents, on their knees, cleaning my oomska. I still mist at the shame. My mother had apparently turned white-haired overnight at the news of my stroke (though she's not above the teensiest twitch of musical licence, and still looks pretty with-it). My dear stoic father, honest as the days are long, was looking, for once in his life, thoroughly jangled, and I kept wanting to impart upon him mentally the wise words of Grandpa Abe Simpson: "They say the greatest tragedy is when a father outlives his son. I have never fully understood why. Frankly, I can see an upside to it".

They drove me back to Edinburgh. I got better. Astoundingly. Warm beds, untroubled food, long walks down the Water of Leith, decent chat. I got astonishingly better. I could speak with vague, then sudden increasing, clarity again. Handwriting was a slight niggle – caps fine, lower-case wriggles not so much – but mostly I use teeline shorthand, learned long ago in Dundee – and it serves wonderfully. I regained, slowly, the niggling control of my keyboard. Editor Sarah, via texts, nagged with encouragement, tendresses and concern. I was back at work in nine weeks.

I have been astonishingly, absurdly, perpendiculary lucky, lucky to the heights and to the plains. Every stroke is as different as every snowflake. I had a good one; a great many don't. If all I have to do, these days, is carry around forever in my waistcoat a baby stiletto for "opening things better" – toothbrush packaging, lying "easy-open" biscuits – and stutter a bit on the phone (it's improving), then I've fallen lucky. But is all I've learnt, then, from the stroke: my hatred of cold calls and absurd packaging? A thousand times no.

I have become, obliquely, gentler. More forgiving, less rasped. Probably won't last. But I have also now, I hope, finally learned the importance of reaching out, letting down some of the barricades we create, particularly later in life: a smatter of disappointments, be it love or career or money, and it's just too easy for the shutters to go up, increasingly so these days. But – and this is not a rant against Facebook, or not necessarily so – I found, over the past few months, possibly understandably, that my whole instinct post-stroke was to shut up shop and lick my wounds, yet what has saved me has been the very opposite: trusting people, talking to people, finally letting them help, a bit.

As I say, I've been excruciatingly lucky. I've refound friends and family whom I now don't know what I'd do without, and I don't know why I accidentally sidelined some: just my weird caustic mix of arrogance and guilt. And I still don't honestly know what to say to those souls who are truly alone, bereft of both youth and friends. But I think I know what to advise those 30-40-50-somethings tempted to board the shutters. Every real-life interaction (other than cold callers) will give you at least a little joy. Friends are far more willing (unless you've always been an over-needy twanny) than even you know, eager even, to offer help, if you're able to assume the guts to ask for it. Might be nothing: a trip to Argos, some cheese, setting up a sound system. Women have, admittedly, known this since the dawn of time, but women living alone have had a commensurate rise in the last 30 years, and women suffer 55,000 more strokes than men each year. Twice as many are killed by stroke than by breast cancer. And the same friends might, who knows, be able to advise you, rather more quickly than in my case, if you've had a stroke.

Author John Irving once told me that "life can get you any time". Mundane enough, but true. I think, oddly enough, of an afternoon about 15 years ago – myself, Andrew Marr and Arnold Kemp, necking whiskies in the Observer's local, happy and fulfilled. Yet dear Dr Kemp was cut down early and Mr Marr so oddly savaged at the start of the year and yet has been so redoubtable (I have been so much luckier than him, and not just in my possession of the normal size of ears. And my stroke was wholly self-inflicted, by smoking).

For me, I've become happier, quieter, more determined, and bizarrely intrigued as an observer while my brain finds excitingly new little neural pathways. I'm not exactly recommending a stroke as a winning career move. But I am wholly recommending it as a passport to re-engaging with the world, at a crucial time in the affairs of, particularly, men but increasingly women. Just try to see friends daily. Awesomely banal advice, I know. I wish I'd taken it.