The nation's binge drinkers have so far failed to rise to the challenge, issued in my last blog entry, of coming up with some insults to hurl at me on the basis of my palsied face. Standards, clearly, are slipping. To lend them further inspiration, here as promised is a picture of me plastered with surgical tape like some kind of translucent Egyptian mummy:

The purpose of elevating my cheek and forehead in this manner is to a) give the muscles a bit of a workout and b) let them get used to moving out of their default sagging position in anticipation of nerve function returning. Generally I apply all this before I go to bed, meaning that, with Sparky also wired up to my head, not much skin on the affected side is left unexposed. This is playing havoc with my complexion: I currently look like the front row of a My Chemical Romance gig. As a result I'm yet to work out whether I look weirder like this or in my normal droopy state. A consolation is that having my face stretched this tight gives me an insight into what it must be like to be Cher.

With one eyebrow raised, and a slight smile playing at the corner of the mouth, I am lent an air of benign amusement. There are worse faces to be stuck with in the event of the wind changing, I'd say. Even in this fixed pose, my features suggest a whole gamut of expressions:

• Trendy vicar is introduced to teenage daughter's goth boyfriend;
• Prospective employer scans Lord Archer's CV;
• Broadsheet reader picks up copy of Daily Star in waiting room while car is being MOTed, affects not be enthralled by feature on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!;
• Trainee teacher refuses to admit he has lost control of classroom;
• Sitcom mum shoots audience look of exasperation at fecklessness of offspring (played by a young Nicholas Lyndhurst);
• Pub landlord listens patiently to underage-looking would-be Bacardi Breezer drinker's explaination of why he's left his ID at home;
• Premiership manager reads pre-match assesment of himself made in press conference by Jose Mourinho;
• Music promoter steels himself to inform crowd of Babyshambles fans that Pete Doherty has been arrested on his way to the venue;
• How film critic hopes readers think he composes himself during screenings of sexually-explicit movies he routinely describes as "boring" (as opposed to how he actually looks while watching said flicks);
• Roger Moore attempts to act.

And many more which, I am sure, you will suggest...

A couple of weeks ago I was in a nightclub in London celebrating a friend’s birthday. Towards the end of the evening I went to collect my jacket from the cloakroom. As I handed over my ticket a group of studenty-looking blokes approached. One of them gave me a quizzical look, stopped in his tracks and pointed at me. “Jarvis Cocker!”, he exclaimed. “Jarvis Cocker! JARVIS COCKER!”

Now, I was a bit worse for wear at this point, but I have to admit I was confused. I resemble the erstwhile Pulp frontman about as closely as I do Whitney Houston or the Treaty of Versailles. For a start I’m a good six inches shorter and, at the very least, a stone heavier than he; I am blessed with neither a Sheffield accent nor a dry, mordant wit nor the panache to make bri-nylon shirts look good. It occurred to me that the student type must have been on some sort of elaborate wind-up, and the only two possible dignified responses to his outburst - composing a fabulously witty put-down, or hitting him - were way beyond my powers at this stage of the night.

But then, through my alcoholic daze, I realised I had misread the situation. The student’s expression was not one of contempt but of genuine, elated admiration. With one hand he was giving an enthusiastic thumbs up. With the other he was pointing not at me, but at my glasses.

Now, I normally leave my vast black horn-rimmed specs in my coat when I visit a pub or club. They’re slightly too big for me and have a habit of falling off my nose when I’m dancing (or, indeed, talking animatedly, as is my wont in such states of refreshment). But on this occasion I’d left their case at home and was sporting them unselfconsciously. So I wasn’t quite prepared for fellow revellers to make the connection between my eyewear and that of Mr Cocker:

Certainly, I’m a great admirer of his. As this gnarled survivor of an adolescence forged during the dufflecoated 90s can testify, Jarvis stood out from the pages of the NME like a Paisley-patterned sore thumb: marrying lyrical dexterousness with deft showmanship and an unerring pop sensibility while the rest of indie rock was furrowing its monobrow and droning out platitudes. Common People was the great satirical masterpiece of Britpop - a searing blast of social commentary with its own Whigfield-style dance - and his eponymous solo album out last month is a return to form.

However, none of this was on my mind when I bought my glasses back in March. Although mildly short sighted, my number one priority with the purchase was to keep my wonky eye protected from dust and grit. Thus the frame I went for, a pair of sunglasses whose dark lenses were replaced with the clear prescription variety, are huge (although admittedly not quite as huge as Jarvis's): covering my eyeballs from beside and below as well as in front. Looking back, I was probably slightly over-cautious. It has become apparent that the gold weight in my upper right eyelid is doing such a good job that a more discreet pair of blinkers might have sufficed. Nonetheless, If I hadn’t gone for them I wouldn’t have inadvertently found myself at the vanguard of a fashion revolution.

This NHS-style design is one that has led to the debagging of a million school-age Elvis Costello lookalikes. But I swear to God, every time I wear my specs on a night out someone asks me where I bought them. It’s not like I can claim any fashion foresight in selecting them, but the novelty of at least appearing to be ahead of the style bibles hasn’t worn off yet. And, if nothing else, wearing a pair of huge bins like these distracts attention away from my palsied cheek (to my amazement, no-one has yet hurled any insults at me on the basis of my odd-looking face. I’m a bit disappointed, to be honest: I would have credited Britain’s binge drinkers with more front and imagination. If the Lindens clinic is to be believed they don’t have long left to get their act together. So I hereby issue a challenge to the nations drunks: show us what you’re made of. You have a proud tradition to live up to).

In the end I found myself shaking the student’s hand and directing him to the Perth branch of Vision Express before staggering towards my night bus. I’d like to tell you that I made my exit with a Cocker-like flourish, but both you and I know that would be less than truthful.

Facial disfigurement is in vogue at the moment. The Guardian newspaper, in which I told the story of my own mis-shapen mug back in January, ran two articles on the subject last week: firstly, a set of interviews with servicemen who had been horribly scarred in WW2, then a story about how children from third world countries are having their deformities surgically corrected in the UK. Naturally I'm gratified to see I've started the ball rolling on a new journalistic sub-genre.

Feeling pleased with myself for sitting atop the zeitgeist's very bleeding edge, on Monday I trooped towards Manchester to visit the Lindens Clinic. regular readers will recall this is the UK's only centre for the treatment of facial palsies (although it now has another branch in Aberdeen); it's the place that provided Young Sparky and has given me some hope about one day looking vaguely symmetrical again. Anyway, as my treatment is funded by you, the taxpayer, I thought it my civic duty to update you on my progress.

Well, it's good news so far. To me, any shift in the pattern of my sagging cheek is imperceptible on a day-to-day basis. But a comparison between what I look like now and photos taken on my last visit show my droop is tightening up a bit. An electronic reading of the damaged nerve shows it's slowly recovering and improving its ability to send signals to the face. None of this is particularly dramatic stuff (as I could have predicted in advance just by looking in the mirror) but I appear to be on the road to approaching something resembling normalcy.

For the first time I took part in an activity called biofeedback. This involved having my face wired up to a computer, and trying to smile. On the screen was a graphic of a young boy. When my nerve responded to my instructions the boy grew into a superhero. I didn't quite feel able to leap buildings with a single bound myself, and it seems bizarre that I have to re-learn to do something as simple as smiling, but I was quite chuffed to notice that something was going on beneath my skin.

Diana Farragher, the specialist physiotherapist runs the clinic, told me to up the amount of time I spend with Sparky. She also suggested I start using tape to keep my muscles raised when I go to bed at night: this way they get used to being in a position other than total relaxation. I look so thoroughly bizarre when I do this that I will devote an entire blog entry to the process at a future date, complete with pictures. In the meantime, I'm getting good practice in for wrapping my Christmas presents.

As I left, I asked Diana how long I might expect to wait before the day of reckoning comes. Totally non-plussed, she told me that if all goes to plan my droop should have cleared up and small movements should be noticeable within four months. I can't quite bring myself to believe this, having lived with the palsy for so long that part of me now accepts it as a constant presence. I'm a cautious chap by nature. But I could certainly learn to live with the possibility of never again being interesting enough to become the subject of features in any broadsheet supplements.

It feels like today's my birthday. I should get some cake in or something. Blow up the balloons! Crack open the Babysham! A present? For me? Aw shucks, you shouldn't have.

Exactly a year ago to this moment I was out of it. General anaesthetic does that to you. I know I never normally remember my dreams, but this was nothing but blackness, a total surrender of consciousness. Like a kind of temporary death, if that doesn't sound too melodramatic. When I had another minor operation on my eye a couple of months later they put me under again, and I resolved beforehand to try and recall something of the experience. But I couldn't. If the relationship between the conscious mind and the body is analogous to a ghost in a machine, as Descartes' critics say he believed, then I was temporarily exorcised.

I've often wondered what happened during those 13 and a half hours they spent operating on me. I know the mechanics of the procedure - the sawing into the skull, the sucking out of the tumour - because I've got the scars and the palsy to prove it. But it's the more mundane aspects of the procedure that intrigue me. What did I look like, lying there on the table? Did my face twitch when they prodded against my brain? What did the surgeons and the nurses and the anaesthetist talk about while they held my life in their grasp?

It's not like I had any kind of a choice in the matter, but to all intents and purposes I surrendered myself to that medical team. The night before I lay awake from 2.30am until they came to take me down to theatre four hours later, wondering what was ahead of me. Would I still be alive in 24 hours? The odds were heavily in my favour. But would I ever again be able to stand upright, swallow, think coherently, move the right side of my face?

These days I always deny some people's expectation (which I admit I shared before the operation) that the experience would transform me in some way, make me a different person. My brain might have taken a few weeks to click back into gear again but I remain essentially the same man I was on November 7 last year. But at the same time I know that without that operation I would not now be sitting here writing this. And were my tumour detected later, or removed by another group of surgeons, the outcome might well have been worse.

Who knows? The last year has felt longer to me, from the woozy half-remembered time in hospital and shortly thereafter through limping rehabilitation to gradually regaining fitness and relative normalcy. I certainly don't consider this chapter of my life closed, not as long as I harbour ambitions of seeing my face animated again and of returning to London. But I look back on where I was a year ago today and am humbled by how I am indebted to so many people. You know who you are.

I suppose now I inhabit a kind of afterlife, whether I like it or not. All I can conclude is that November 8 marks an anniversary which for as long as I live will be at least as significant as my birthday. If August 27 marks the day I came into the world, today I celebrate still being here.  

I'm feeling pathetically, tragically pleased with myself for taking possession of the above medal. It was handed out to everyone who completed the Corinthian endeavour that was Saturday's annual Stranraer 10k race. I finished 63rd in a field of 175 with a time of 49 minutes and 12 seconds. While this won't give Paula Radcliffe any sleepless nights, it is, I'd humbly suggest, not bad going for someone who earlier this year needed a walking stick to get to the end of the road and back.

As I've mentioned before, my recent dash towards fitness (in relative terms, anyway - not long ago I made Rik Waller look like Roger Black) was achieved first by accident and then by default. My physiotherapist suggested joining a gym might improve my balance, and a combination of vanity and boredom got me down there most mornings. The treadmill seemed to make a difference - six months on my equilibrium is more or less normal and I'm a stone lighter - and I promised myself that when I could manage to run five miles on it in 40 minutes I'd take to the pavement. This wasn't nearly as big a jump as I was led to believe it would be and, in a fit of bravado, last week I decided to pit myself against Wigtownshire's finest.

Like Dame Kelly Holmes, but much slower, obviously, my strategy was to start at the back and speed up when everyone else started to get knackered. So for the first 20 minutes I trotted along with the old age pensioners and the chronically obese before stepping forward a gear. This worked to my advantage for two reasons. Firstly, I was never anywhere near the small elite aiming for sub-35 minute times who had travelled from running clubs across Scotland, and therefore was never tempted to match them and burn myself out. Secondly, my mediocre time was ameliorated psychologically by the fact that I spent the final two-thirds of the race overtaking other people rather than being overtaken myself. And I can tell you, there is nothing, nothing more satisfying than passing someone who is clothed in more expensive gear than you.

The course was quite tough, with a couple of climbs early on. I had a moment of weakness on about 8k where my legs threatened to stage a work-to-rule in protest at the increased productivity targets demanded of them. But I thought about Lance Armstrong winning the Tour de France 16 months after leaving a cancer ward and asked my extremities whether they wanted to make me look like a twat in front of the entire Machars.

I put on a final spurt at the entrance to Stranraer Academy and heard the applause from the two-dozen strong crowd lined along the running track that led to the finish line. Over the tannoy a broad south-west accent intoned something like "And here is no.109, Jon Kelly from Dumfries! Come on! You can do it!" But I was too deep in oxygen debt to pay attention to anything other than my limbs and my lungs. With my very final reserves of energy I made it to the end, about 60 seconds ahead of my best training time. It was a good five minutes at least before I was able to speak properly.