The fruits of friendship

During my recent spell in hospital, the nurses were generally pretty friendly. 'Friendly' is an interesting word. I think it means someone behaving like a friend when they aren't an actual friend. This is a good thing when they are the person picking you up after you've fallen off the toilet. I would much prefer that whoever is doing that sort of thing just behaved as if they were a friend, rather than acting completely clinically and professionally. That's just me, of course; I know that everyone has different preferences. Nevertheless, thank you Amanda, and all the rest of the nursing staff.

The other thing about being in hospital for ten weeks is that friends become very important. It's bloody tedious being on a ward. You get woken up at the crack of dawn, then do nothing until you fall asleep about fifteen hundred hours later. Every day is exactly the same. And the food – don't get me started on the food. The same eight day menu repeating over and over, which I guess wouldn't be too bad if it wasn't for the fact that the food is all cooked hundreds of miles away in a central factory of nastiness, from where it is dispatched to all the hospitals in the world and given different titles. The names are almost immaterial though, since each of the choices on the menu taste equally bad once you put them into your mouth.

So that's why friends are important. First off, they break up the day. Second, they bring you books to read. And third, they bring you proper food. You can even text them and say: bring me a thermos of real coffee, with milk and a tiny bit of sugar. Or you can call up on your mobile phone and say, "It's time I had some more malt whisky. Could you top up my flask?" I know you're not meant to have a mobile phone in hospital, because they want you to use the phenomenally expensive PatientLine service instead, but we all ignored that in the Spinal Injury Unit.

So my message to you is this: if you anticipate going through any extended period of illness or rehabilitation, make sure that you have your friends lined up ahead of time, because they'll be essential.

You need a lot of friends in hospital, just like you need a lot of fruit (which I will come back to in a minute). But what makes me sad - and this is something I worry about quite a bit - is that many disabled people don't have these circles of friends to draw on.

Now, one of the subjects I am known for is disabled sexuality, and with my friends Kath and Nic I have also talked to many people about the topic. After a lot of work, thought and analysis, the conclusion we came to was that for many disabled people, the problem of 'how to do it' is much less important than the problem of 'who to do it with'. You see, this sexuality and disability thing is a lot simpler than it might at first appear.

By saying that the real problem of sex is this question of who to do it with, I don't mean that everyone has a huge choice of potential lovers. The people you end up sleeping with are usually a subsection of the people who are your friends. But if some disabled people don't have many friends in the first place, then they have a still smaller pool of potential people with whom to form sexual relationships. Which suggests that making friends is the most important first step in disabled sexuality.

Furthermore, I'm fairly sure that having a friend is more important than having a lover anyway, especially as sex generally lasts less than an hour, while a friend is someone you can hang out with all day without even making a wet patch - unless you're very careless with the ice cream.

There's a lot of prejudice about out there, and it’s one of the things which can isolate disabled people. So having friends becomes more important, but making those friends in the first place can be very difficult. As a disability community, we should try and do something about this, because while friendship is as important as independent living, employment, civil rights and all the rest, it's a lot harder to achieve.

Aristotle said that "wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit". That makes friendship sound quite like a pear. And all the pears I get from my supermarket's home delivery service are hard as rocks. They sit in the fruit bowl for months until, when nobody is looking, they turn to mush in a fraction of a nanosecond. It's definitive evidence of Einstein's theory of relativity. Human time and pear time are two totally separate scales. It's one of the mysteries of the Universe. I don’t know why CERN spent $6 billion on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, when they could have achieved the same effect by spending £5 in a greengrocer.

Like friends, pears come in lots of different types – commice, avocado, conference (I've known plenty of those in my time), and the prickly variety, who can be hard work but are invariably worth it in the end. But whatever fruit you happen to choose, I hope you avoid the bad apples and end up with the fruit salad of your dreams.