So first thing this morning, my phone goes. Can I call the plastic surgeon’s secretary.  I call the plastic surgeon’s secretary. Someone has cancelled, she tells me, and I can take their slot. Do I want to come in for my first operation on Tuesday?

Well, I hadn't seen that one coming. The first thing that goes through my head is: “My work might not be too keen on this” (I hadn’t even warned them surgery was in the offing). The second is: “Yes, yes, indeed I do want to get this out of the way very much indeed.”

Assuming nothing would be happening until well into summer, I hadn’t made any sort of preparation whatsoever. So I’m thrown into a flurry of booking transport to Glasgow, warning my parents that I’m about to impose on them, and so on. Work can’t be nicer, it turns out, and of course I can take as much time off as I need. By mid-morning, my appointment with the scalpel is confirmed.

I’d take the time to reflect on this, and offer you my considered response. But I haven’t two minutes to myself all day. Never did I anticipate the brontosaurean NHS would compel me to act so swiftly. Remind me to ask the plastic surgeon if he can fit in a bit of liposuction while he’s at it.

The other week I went to see a plastic surgeon.

I don’t think I’m typical of the sort of person who goes to see plastic surgeons. I own neither a hairbrush nor a comb. I’ve never moisturised. When my clothes start to fall apart, I go shopping for new garments in the same manner that the SAS used to carry out shoot-to-kill operations in South Armagh - unsentimentally, at maximum velocity, and with scant regard for bystanders.

However. More than two years after the nerve controlling half my face was knackered by the removal of a rather large tumour, it has become apparent that my head is not about to become symmetrical of its own volition. I’ve tried waiting for the nerve to heal. I’ve tried stimulating it electronically. And while my right cheek droops slightly less than it did 18 months ago, it doesn’t look like springing into action any time soon.

I don’t cry myself to sleep about this state of affairs. But I would quite, you know, like to look vaguely normal again. And so last week I found myself embarking on a path trodden by the likes of Pete Burns, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jocelyn “The Bride of” Wildestein. I went to see a plastic surgeon.

I’d made the journey up from London expecting to have to fight my corner. Since my operation I’ve been consistently told that a conservative, wait-and-see approach is best. Moreover, a general perception of plastic surgery as something almost frivolous - which, compared to, say, the removal of a brain tumour, it is, at least in my case - led me to imagine that waiting times might be years long. There will be some people reading this, I am sure, who disapprove of the fact I might be entitled to such a procedure on the NHS.

But the consultant himself - an amiable man, probably in his mid-40s, as far removed from the stereotypical Hollywood hack surgeon as it is possible to imagine - disarmed me as soon as he sat down in his Glasgow office. I didn’t have to convince him that anything needed done. After two years it is very unlikely that the nerve will recover, he told me, and reanimating a palsied face is always difficult. But not impossible.

Here’s what he proposed. A spare nerve would be extracted from the back of my calf. This would be grafted to the functioning facial nerve on my left side and run under the surface of the skin, over my top lip, to the right hand side, as in figure six below:

It would take six to nine months before the transplanted nerve could transmit signals again. After this interval, he would open up the right (wonky) side of my face, take out the flaccid cheek muscle, and replace it with one taken from my inner thigh. I’d have to wait another three or four months before everything started working. And, the surgeon warned, “you won’t be able to move that cheek as much as you did before the operation. But there’s probably an 85% chance of giving you a decent smile.”

There were downsides, he added. The leg muscle is a slightly different shape from the cheek muscle, so my face wouldn’t be entirely even. And I’d be left with two facial scars: one on the left side, running vertically parallel to my ear at about sideburn level; and a second one on the right, again running down to the lobe, then darting over to the corner of my jaw, and continuing to about the middle of my neck. There were all sorts of steps that could be taken at the time of the incision to minimise the visibility of this, the surgeon said. I pictured a symmetrical, but bearded, version of myself, and calculated that it had to be an improvement. Alternatively, I could follow Michael Jackson’s example and blame it on a hereditary skin complaint.

“So then,” he concluded. “Do you need some time to think about this?” No, I didn’t. I'd heard enough.

The maximum time I can be kept waiting for the initial operation is 18 weeks. A quick spot of mental arithmetic told me I could be smiling again by the summer of 2009. There was a bounce in my step as I left the hospital and sauntered towards the Trongate.

When you look at someone's face, what's the first feature you notice - the eyes? The mouth? The Charles Manson-style swastika tattoo on the forehead?

Because I'm weird, my gaze tends to fall elsewhere: on the creases between the top lips and the cheeks. Until fairly recently I wouldn't have paid these wrinkles any attention whatsoever. But I've started to realise how diverse and varied they can be. Some people have deep, furrowed grooves, like, I don't know, hangdog Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. Meanwhile, others have such smooth, un-lined faces that it's hard to tell where lip stops and cheek begins, even when they're smiling. Well-known junk food advocate Gary Lineker, for instance.

It might not be a part of the body you'd spend much time thinking about, unless you're some sort of monomaniac wrinkle-fetishist (and believe me, contrary to what this blog entry might suggest, I don't go that far myself). But it seems to me that this particular crevice sends out all sorts of signals about our character. Would the great Walter Matthau have been so regularly cast as an old grump were he not so lined and drawn? Conversely, Cher 's surgically-tautened countenance earns her little but scorn, but would our misogynistic entertainment industry allow her to keep performing if she had the skin tone of John Prescott?

The reason I'm paying attention is because, unusually, each half of my face represents either extreme. When the removal of tumour caused my right-sided facial nerves to palsy, there was no line whatsoever there. On the left, however, the functioning nerves went into overdrive to compensate, making the muscle tone on that side taughter than Ken Dodd's wallet. Half of me looked like Joan Collins. The other half like Sir John Mortimer. It wasn't the best look I've ever sported, although it probably did beat the wedge haircut I had in the early 90s.

And now? With the nerve function slowly recovering, I'm starting to look slightly more symetrical. Very slightly. A veritable Grand Canyon remains on the left. Beneath the right nostril, however, a faint wrinkle extends for about an inch before fading out into a marginally-reduced droop at the corner of the mouth. Without wanting to give the misleading impression that I have overnight transmogrified into a matinee idol, the sagging is now ever so slightly less noticeable.

This week I took the train up to Manchester to have my facial nerves examined in the Lindens clinic once again. They're still progressing, slowly as ever. A sensation I thought was the active left side pulling on the flaccid right turns out to in fact be me being able to send a signal to the palsied cheek muscles. Admittedly this signal is still too weak to make anything happen, but still; if progress were to come to a halt, that would be me stuck like this, without the wind even having changed.

I know that compared to 99.99999% of the world's population I have nothing whatsoever to complain about. And of course I was very fortunate to come through the whole tumour thing as well as I did. But I still can't help feeling a bit frustrated at the pace of change. There are aspects of my life I feel it's wise to put on hold while I wait to halfway presentable. And for all I try to put the experience of illness behind me, I don't quite feel that resolution, or closure, or whatever the latest wanky psychobabble term is, will come until this final process is over.

On Sunday morning I'm going to try and get my tickets for Glastonbury. It would be better if I didn't have to bring Sparky, but needs must. At least I'd have something to keep me stimulated when the turgid likes of Bloc Party and the Kooks are playing.

Once every few months, my job compells me to work a week of nightshifts. This I don't particularly mind; I get to wear civvies, stop shaving and see how fast my chair's wheels will carry me from one end of the empty office to the other. There is also very little that is more satisfying than riding the tube home at 6am, looking smugly at a carriage of commuters, and knowing that by the time they all clock in for the day's anomie and wage-slavery I will be in my bed.

However, that's where my problems begin. You see, I'd previously thought  that the road I live on was very quiet. It's in an unremarkable suburb of north London, and not much ever happens here; there are no bangin' warehouse raves or Libertines-style guerilla gigs or mass lynchings of suspected paedophiles by vigilante mobs. Instead there are a lot of young families, pensioners and cats. If any of them go in for serial killing or converging around massive reggae soundsystems their double glazing stops me from knowing about it.

By night, at least. I'd never been around to work this out before, but during daylight hours the place fills up with a cacophony of background noise. Dogs being taken for walks bark at each other. Toddlers shriek and yell as their harrassed mums let the loose in their gardens. Bin lorries beep-beep-beep their way up the road. My bedroom is at the rear of the house, which you would think would be quiter. And at night, it is. But I've only just found out that it backs onto a street full of mechanics' garages, clanking and whirring and vrooming during business hours enough to turn even Jeremy Clarkson into Swampy.

So I find myself trying to nod off just at the point where my neighbourhood comes alive. As my heavy eyelids fail to drop, I curse myself for failing to buy earplugs...

...And then remember that I don't need them. I  turn my good left ear to my pillow, leave the dead right one pointing unreceptively towards the din, and zonk out. Why did I ever think my tumour was in any way a bad thing?

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Being "corned beef" in only one ear, I think I should show solidarity with those who are bilaterally deaf. So I'm posting a link to a petition on the 10 Downing St website by started by a reader of this blog who wants all digital TV programmes to carry subtitles. I suggest you sign it if you're a UK subject as it's a good cause; more so than some of the other nonsense on the site, such as campaigns to replace the national anthem with 'Gold' by Spandau Ballet, honour the broadcaster James Whale with a Knighthood and allow the sale of elephants in pet shops (actually, I think I might put my name to that last one as well).

Some people only feel truly alive when they are singing, or dancing, or channelling their energies into creating great art. Me, I only achieve such self-realisation when I am participating in a pub quiz. In everyday life my disordered brain struggles to process routine information, like remembering that I need to pick up my keys before shutting the front door behind me. But ask it to answer random and entirely useless trivia questions - such as who was the first man to wear yellow trousers in the House of Commons, or how do crabs urinate, or which former West Ham goalie used to work for NASA* - and it clicks into gear like a well-oiled if slightly grey and mushy machine.

My year off meant I was able to devote more time than ever to harvesting nuggets of ephemera. Initially housebound for much of the day, I would flit around Wikipedia for hours stumbling upon precis of different breeds of owl, or Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, or the career or PJ Proby - anything that I could take on board within my two-minute attention span. The result of this was that my head became stuffed with all manner of nonsense that no amount of brainwashing will ever shift - such as where the world's largest ball of string is located, or what is the collective noun for a group of ravens, or who invented the hovercraft**.

None of this rubbish has any practical value whatsoever, but I returned from my break at least hoping to take the capital's pub quizzes by storm. Sadly, however, the triumph to which I am due has not yet materialised. This is because I cannot find one running anywhere near my house. I have moved into a trivia vacuum.

When I first came down south five years ago I was a regular at a music quiz run weekly at the Old Dairy in Finsbury Park. To prevent High Fidelity-style anoraks dominating proceedings, the master of ceremonies would always include a round on Rick Astley or Banarama. It was brilliant, but now I live across town and can't get there in time.

So I'm issuing a heartfelt plea: if anyone knows of a decent pub quiz in north west London, let me know. I'll come along and join your team and tell you (if you didn't know already) what phobia Napoleon suffered from, which is the only mammal that can't jump, and what bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windscreen wipers and laser printers all have in common***. Please. I've got to get all this drivel out there somehow.

* Benjamin Disraeli, through their eyes, Shaka Hislop

** Cawker City, Kansas (it has a circumference of 40 feet), a murder, Sir Christopher Cockerell

*** Fear of cats, the elephant, they were all invented by women

Unemployment should be recognised as a craft, if not as a full-blown profession. The many pitfalls and traps thrown at the dole-ite must be negotiated with no small measure of skill and expert insight. Never mind restart training and back-to-work classes. The DWP should run seminars on the best way to fill the dead time between getting up and the One O’Clock News, or on how to sit in a cafe and make a 50p cuppa and a copy of the Daily Record last all afternoon.

I spent over a year out of regular work, first of all on occupational sick pay, then on incapacity benefit, and latterly as a freelance doing the odd article whenever I could be bothered. Superficially it was an easy life, with financial pressures eased by the facts my parents refused to charge me rent and I managed to squirrel away a small amount of savings. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, so too did my brain loathe the absence of the intrigues, internal politics and distractions of office life. So it endeavoured to come up with a few of its own.

The biggest challenge faced by the benefit claimant is how to fill up the day. Generally I’d wake at about 8.30am, make myself a cup of tea, and wonder what on earth I was going to do until the evening. In the very early days of my recovery this wasn’t too much of an issue. I couldn’t walk very far without getting tired, but had a large pile of DVDs to get through. By the time I'd watched them all, however, I was well enough to get restless without being fit enough for employment. When the novelty of not having to hit deadlines and being free to amuse myself wore off, I was frozen by that dead chill: how do I fend off boredom?

If the weather was ok, I could go for a walk: that’d take a hour and a bit if I paced it out. On the way home I could get a paper, and flicking through that would take me to lunch. The process of preparing, eating and washing up this meal could last me from 1pm to 2pm if I had the radio on. And then what? I could read a book (I could get through one a day for much of my convalescence), or email some friends, or plunder my record collection for something I hadn’t heard for a while. Anything to pad things out.

Time slows down when it has no value, when the absence of deadlines takes away any premium from the ticking of the clock. But so too do the passage of routine events when you don’t have to rush them. Now I’m back at work I’ll be in and out of the bathroom within 10 minutes each morning. For much of last year it might have taken me an hour to get from nightclothes to shower to dressing gown to brushing my teeth to shaving and finally to getting dressed. There was no rush, why hurry things? If I got finished any quicker I’d just have to find something else to do.

People assumed I must have been watching a lot of TV; in fact, I rarely switched it on before my parents got home. This was not because I think of myself as one of these terribly clever people who is much too smart to waste time on popular culture. Quite the opposite: my attention span is so short that the average half-hour programme is too much for me to concentrate on. That, and the fact that daytime telly is a profoundly depressing experience: endless adverts where Carol Vorderman and Phil “wife-beater” Tufnell implore those with poor credit ratings to fall deeper into debt might as well have been replaced with a big flashing sign reading YOU ARE WORTHLESS, LUMPEN FLOTSAM, DOLE BOY.

Thank God, then, for the internet. Email kept me in contact with friends on the other side of the country and this blog gave me a task to focus on. As well as writing it, there was a stage after my brief flurry of minor press celebrity when my inbox was getting hundreds of new messages a week: apologies to anyone who didn’t get a reply during this time. And who needs TV when you’ve got YouTube? I could literally spend hours floating around the site watching three-minute clips of rubbish: Chaka Khan playing the drums , for instance, or Phil Collins wrestling with Ultimate Warrior. While singing Two Hearts.

The digital music revolution helped keep me sane, too. Although I’m still too Luddite to work out how to illegally fileshare, the MySpace pages of new bands were probably my single biggest distraction. Filling up my iPod was a mammoth project that took a couple of months, and through my laptop I usually had 6 music on for most of the day.

The advent of spring and summer made the task of keeping myself amused much easier. Though Dumfries is hardly a town brimming with distractions - once you’ve wandered along the High Street once you’ve done it a thousand times, and believe me, I did do it a thousand times - it is surrounded by spectacular countryside which, like some sort of Enid Blyton character, I spent a lot of time exploring. It was at this point that I stopped worrying and learned to love being unemployed - where would I rather have been, sweating in an office filing weather stories, or wandering through a forest in shorts feeling the sun on my face?

As documented elsewhere, I started to develop an uncharacteristic interest in physical exercise. Initially my physiotherapist suggested I go to the gym as a way of working on my balance. But after a few painful initial sessions I found myself addicted. At the time I was focused on shedding some of the weight I had gained, but looking back this was probably a way of expending the surplus of energy and restlessness that I’ve accumulated. It is ironic, at the same time, that it took serious illness to get me fitter than I ever have been in my life.

As I started to return to my keyboard, however, I found I was in suddenly caught between two stools. I lacked the affirmation that self-sufficiency and a permanent job provide. But likewise I was now clearly too healthy to be excused from duty. Whether rightly or wrongly, we define ourselves by our jobs: and “I’m a journalist” was clearly what I wanted to say, rather than “I sit in my parents front room scanning the job pages and then making myself a scone”. Friends would make jokes about being dole scum and so on, and I’d laugh along with them; but I’d feel a nagging twinge at my sense of self-respect whenever I thought about being out of work. Damn this protestant work ethic.

The unemployed are always the first target for rightwingers: never mind millionaire tax-dodgers or corporate subsidy-junkies, who cost the taxpayer far more, it’s the poor sod on £56 a week who’s the real sponger. While I don’t excuse benefit fraud, I also know how low people’s self-esteem must be to see no other future for themselves other than depending on the largesse of the Job Centre.

If anyone else finds themselves in a similar position, my advice is simple: embrace the dole, look for the positives in escaping the career treadmill, take the opportunity to enjoy the scenery. Do all the things you’d want to do if you weren’t too busy. Think of it as a gap year. But make sure when the novelty starts to wear off that you’ve got an exit strategy. Oh, and get a blog. That’s another hour of the day used up.

"Oi, mate. What's wrong with your face?"

In an earlier instalment I challenged the nation's drunks to come up with some epithets about my palsy. A couple of weeks ago, at the bar of a pub on Chalk Farm Road, one of them answered the call.

He was well-spoken, floppy hair, trenchcoat, half-cut, exuding that innate belief in his own untouchability that tends to be the by-product of an expensive education. Why did he want to know, I asked, was he looking for a sore face himself?

He turned pale. I'm far from a physically intimidating presence. But I do find that, in this part of the world at least, a Scottish accent growled at the correct pitch suggests an adolescence spent running with razor gangs and negotiating the social hierarchies of borstal, rather than one passed largely in my bedroom reading the NME.

"No, no," he stammered. "I was worried about you. I thought you'd been punched or something."

I haven't been punched, I muttered, willing the barman to return to my half-filled Guinness glass.

Silence, and with it the implication that this is a dialogue in which I am not keen to engage.

"So then, if you don't mind me asking, what is wrong with your face?" 

I sighed. I don't mind people asking at all. Indeed, if I know someone beyond an entirely superficial level it seems unnatural if they don't broach the subject: it's literally staring right at them. I've talked to you lot about it plenty of times, after all, and am usually the first one in any company to start telling Elephant Man jokes. I do, however, prefer that when someone raises this, I have already established with them a more intimate relationship than, say, that of two complete strangers waiting at the same bar.

"If you're that desperate to know, it's was caused by a brain tumour," I told him. I  then gave a one-sentence tutorial on the function of facial nerves, said that I'd looked a lot worse, and that I hopefully would eventually look a lot better.

At this point he seemed to acknowledge that he had transgressed several social codes, and attempted to cover his tracks by dissembling. "Oh right, yeah, my father had a similar thing with his face," he blurted.

Really?

"Yeah, yeah, really. And I had a tumour as well. A tumour in my mouth. A mouth tumour. Although it wasn't as bad as yours, obviously."

I raised by one functioning eyebrow. The barman arrived with my pint. I took it wordlessly and returned to my table.

Amazingly, this was the first time anything like this has happened to me.