Another milstone: this weekend I re-entered the giddy social whirl that Brian Potter refers to as "clubland". I have to admit I was a bit apprehensive. Going to pubs and drinking beer and all the manly, grown-up things I've been doing over the last couple of weeks are all very well, but trying to appear suave and elegant in a trendy nightspot is a different matter altogether. I knew I'd be called on to dance, and dancing requires the very qualities which were temporarily robbed of me by the operation: energy, grace, poise. It's not even like I posessed these in spades before they cut me open.

And this wasn't just any old nightclub. For her birthday, a friend had decided she would take us to a club where the punters get to perform 15-minute DJ sets: me and my mate Welsh Tim were on the rota to perform. The pressure was on. I was going to have to inspire the crowd to raptuorous throes of ecstasy, despite having myself about as much stamina as David Crosby after a sticky-bun binge.

Obviously, however, we were brilliant: our playlist (I won't repeat it here, you'd just get so pumped up you'd start headbutting your keyboard) was so jaw-clenchingly superb that most of the audience started randomly punching each other because they couldn't find another way to express this feeling in their hearts. I was careful not to wear white because I suspected it might get a bit Dawn of the Dead. OK, so the whole city of Brighton and Hove is now a smouldering, post-apocalyptic husk, but I think the thousands who perished did so with a grateful smile on their faces.

Here is me (on the left) giving it the superstar DJ:

Then afterwards I had a bit of a sit-down.

Three encounters that sum up the weekend for me:

1. I am on the train from Victoria with a couple who are good pals of mine. After about half an hour, the bloke turns to me and says, "You can, like, hear everything we're saying, can't you? I thought with being deaf on one side you'd need an ear trumpet or something."

2. It is almost the end of the evening in the club and I have elected to have a bit of a dance. I am flailing about unselfconsciously, managing to stay upright, until out of the corner of my eye I notice a woman gurning at me. I double-take, and see she is still doing it: about my age, quite attractive, but contorting her features in my direction like those inbred West Cumbrians used to do competitively on That's Life!. I can't work out if she is a) taking the piss out of my palsy, or b) enacting some sort of elaborate come-on. I decide I can't be doing with either and turn my back.

3. After the club has ended, I am talking to a friend of the friend I am staying with. She asks me what I do for a living and I, a bit pissed by this stage, decide not to flannell around with "journalist on a career break" or anything so euphemistic. "I am," I tell her, "on benefits. I'm redundant. I'm on the sick." She looks confused, and asks - not in a nasty Daily Mail way, but genuinely surprised - "If you're well enough to get drunk and play records in a nightclub, surely you're well enough to work?" What I should, of course, say, is: "Well, recovery is a process, not an event, and though I hope not to be off work much longer, I need to get my physiotherapy sorted before I start properly pushing myself again. Indeed, tonight was for me an important psychological victory." But I don't. I cackle, and tell her: "Basically, I'm a scrounger. You subsidise me to sit about the house all day. How do you like them apples?"