'You can't move, can you, uncle Ed?" My five-year-old nephew Nicholas greeted me after a long, quiet stare.

"Not much, but I can do this," I replied, shrugging my shoulders.

"Can I have a go in your lift?"

"OK, but don't jump about, it might break down."

He jumped into my through-the-floor lift that operates between the living room and my bedroom and went up and down half a dozen times.

"Can you move in that chair?" he asked, staring now at my electric wheelchair.

"Not yet, but I will do soon. Rasmus can do it though."

Rasmus was my personal assistant from Denmark. He demonstrated. The little boy was particularly fascinated by the way the chair could raise me to a normal standing height.

"Can I do it?" he said with excitement, and up and down I went.

"That's enough now," I told him, smiling.

His finger hovered over the button: "You can't stop me, can you?"

Children take you as you are, with curiosity but without embarrassment. Not so my old friends in the Supper Club. We used to meet once a month at one of our houses, about 14 of us, each couple or singleton cooking one dish on a theme chosen by that month's host. The first time they saw me in hospital I had been transferred from intensive care to the spinal unit and I was ready for entertainment. (The average length of stay for someone with a broken neck or back in a spinal unit is about six months. My sentence was 12 months inside, doing extra time due to the bad behaviour of my care organisers. They allowed all manner of things usually banned in hospitals, such as takeaway meals and booze.)

The women - four or five of them - were the first to come to share a cake and a bottle of wine to celebrate my wife's birthday, and we enjoyed a jolly hour or so talking and laughing. A few weeks later three of the men from the club turned up. Unlike the women, they were clearly unnerved as they tiptoed around the bed as if afraid my paralysis was catching. Afterwards they told me that I was so shrunken and hollow-faced they barely recognised me. I was blissfully unaware of my appearance because, by accident or design, there were no mirrors in the spinal unit other than in the bathrooms, and all my ablutions were performed in bed. I thought I had recovered in leaps and bounds from the emaciated figure who had nearly died of pneumonia in Bolivia.

The next meeting was on my birthday: we threw a party lasting until 11, well past the 9pm chucking out time on the ward. The atmosphere was lighter this time and the conversation less stilted, ranging from the normal gossipy chat to politics. It depressed me to think that I might have to go through this process of "shock and thaw" with everyone I met until my friend, Gina, a jazz singer from London, suggested a grand coming-out party. She thought (wrongly) that, since I was going home at weekends, it would not be long before I was home for good, and I may as well come out of the closet once and for all.

We duly hired the local jazz venue and sent out invitations. Nobody RSVP'd, of course, and it looked like being a dismal failure. As I was being wheeled up the road, I remember wondering how to put a brave face on it should there be only a few, faithful bodies rattling around. I need not have worried. About 300 turned up, representing just about everybody I had ever known - and all those I had fallen out with. They came up to talk, some relaxed, others tentative and a little fearful. Gina was on first with a mellow jazz set. In the interval, old friends and old enemies took the opportunity to greet and spar as in the old days.

I was supposed to make a speech but the moment I tried my eyes filled with tears and I couldn't speak. My old climbing partner made a speech instead followed by my wife who said something about "coming down to earth after being stranded on Planet Spinal". A rock band then took the stage and everyone danced in a heaving mass.

When I now meet new people they are often fearful of saying the wrong things, each in their own way having to come to terms with what has happened to me. I have learned that, rather than being annoyed, it is better to accept the curiosity of children, the tongue-tied pain of friends and the awkward friendliness of strangers. Life is too fleeting for anything else.

· Ed Guiton's column appears fortnightly. edguiton@yahoo.com