Ed Guiton remembers a time when the life he now leads came up as one of those "scare-yourself hypotheticals". It was 1995 and news of Christopher Reeve's riding accident had just broken. Guiton, then a 53-year-old rock-climbing enthusiast, recalls having a two-stage response. "First, I felt desperate sorrow for him." And immediately afterwards: "If that happened to me, I'd rather die."

A decade later, Guiton occupies a wheelchair that allows him to stand, to sit and to travel on the flat at 6mph, but to do none of these things without assistance or the provocation of low-level fury. Guiton can't feel anything below his shoulders. "Every now and then I feel like screaming, railing at this useless body. Because as far as I can see there's nothing wrong with the damn thing. If it was all mutilated or something, it might be easier. But I look at it and think: useless hands, why aren't you functioning?"

We are in Guiton's house in Sheffield, the one his wife moved into while he was still in hospital; the old one was not big enough for his new way of getting around. Four years ago, the former economist suffered a freak accident while on holiday in Bolivia, when a combination of low blood pressure and high altitude caused him to faint and hit his head against the bedpost, breaking his neck. Guiton was transported over the Amazon in a rickety light aircraft and, after an operation, was flown back to England, balanced on a stretcher across the top of three seats. He spent the next year in the spinal unit of Sheffield hospital. "Total nightmare," he says, smiling ruefully.

Nevertheless, for the past four years Guiton has been gradually revising his opinion on the value of life without mobility. He is, he says, "relatively cheerful", an attitude he has achieved despite the "cruel" and "scientifically unjustified" stance of the spinal injuries community in Britain. "In the spinal unit, they always tell you to stop entertaining stupid thoughts about recovery and reconcile yourself to your situation. They force your nose up against the windowpane. Your psychological state is not given much concern."

For this reason, he says, Reeve - who takes the opposite view, that there are demonstrable grounds for hope - is something of a bête noire in what was formerly the graveyard of medical research, now its nerve centre. "He's turned out to be right, which is something the spinal injury business can't accept. The number of people I've come across who've said, 'Don't mention the name Christopher Reeve, dirty words in my house. He goes around spreading false hope.' It's really quite harsh."

Guiton's morning routine is a tedious approximation of what it once was. After his wife Val, a psychologist, goes to work, two carers arrive to get Guiton up (an hour and a half), aid his manual bowel extraction (a further hour) and help to revive his circulation, which after eight hours of lying in one position is in a very sluggish state. "The first time I'm touched, I go into this St Vitus's dance and start leaping about all over the place. Then they shave me, do my teeth, do some passive exercises on my limbs and hoist me into the shower chair. It eats into the day badly."

Guiton's mood in the morning depends on what dreams he has had the night before. For a long time after the accident, he always dreamed he was able-bodied. And he was plagued by an erroneous sense of where his limbs were: he would wake up convinced that his arms were neatly folded across his chest, or that his legs were tucked up under him. "My body image and my actual body were totally out of kilter. I spent ages trying to make my mind align itself with the real position of my body."

The lowest period was the first six months at home. He was institutionalised after a year in hospital and could not make a decision, to the extent, he says, that "it drove my wife bonkers". He had been an active man, a rock-climber and then a hill-walker, and had always soothed away bad moods by taking long, furious walks. Now he was locked inside a body quite alien to him, and he had to find alternative outlets. "The absence of that release is quite damaging and I've got rather bad-tempered," he says. "There isn't really a way to defuse those moments. I suppose I do most of that in the early hours of the morning. I often spend several hours lying awake before I go to sleep. I think I go into a state of meditation almost, trying to work things through. But the rest - anger control - is just a matter of mental discipline, which is not something I'm all that used to."

If there is someone there to turn the pages, he will read a book. If there is not, he will read an electronic book on his computer, with the aid of an electrode inserted into the bridge of his glasses, allowing him to move the cursor by moving his head. He has thought of asking friends, in lieu of Christmas presents, to scan in books that he actually wants to read, rather than the slim pickings available in electronic form. He can shop and pay bills online. He can send emails through voice-activation software. And he has rigged up a system for making telephone calls through the computer, so that he doesn't have to rely on someone holding the receiver to his ear. "When you've got it, you don't notice it; when you've lost it, you think, God, I can't even talk to someone on the phone without someone overhearing."

In some ways, he says, he actually prefers himself since the accident. He plays a bigger role in the lives of his three children. He has become calmer and more reflective. "I used to be quite aggressive, at least verbally, and have become less so. There are definite gains in terms of one's own mental life. I suppose I would trade off a degree of disability for that." He grins painfully. "Not quite this amount."

When Guiton came out of hospital, he wondered whether going up to the hills would be too painful for him. In 12 months, the nearest he had got to the outdoors was being pushed on to a hospital balcony in a rainstorm. "I'd been hermetically sealed in intensive care and was desperate to experience the elements. I wanted the rain on my face." But revisiting the moors was something else. "There is something about the texture of the land under your boots and the rock in your hands and the wind on your face, all of which I was fearful of." But then he thought, what the hell. On the way back from the hospital he asked his wife to take a detour via Stanage, where he used to go rock-climbing. "We just parked, and I looked out over the land; drinking in the life force."

Guiton is intimate with every bit of uneven pavement and pothole between him and the Somerfields supermarket. He can't go out unaccompanied, but is seeking new technology from America that will allow him to propel himself by moving his head. He can wiggle the toes of his left foot. And he imagines a time, 10 years from now, when stem-cell research might have advanced sufficiently to return the use of other limbs. He would be happy with his right hand. "That would be extraordinary. I could have a drink and scratch my nose. You can't imagine how awful it is to have a cold in this position. Having to call someone every 10 minutes to wipe your nose."

There is still immense pain and frustration. But he is heartened, if by nothing else, then by a change of direction in his dreams. "There is one recurring dream, in which I've got two walking sticks and I'm hobbling painfully down the road, jerking about a bit, and people are walking past and I can hear them muttering, 'Poor old sod.' And I'm saying, 'No! You don't realise, this is me 'getting better'."