I'm not a gypsy, muslim, gay, lesbian, black, asian, a trendy vicar, a Brussels "Eurocrat", Sir Ian Blair, an asylum seeker, a member of the RMT, a producer at "dirty" Channel 4, a public sector worker or part of The Self-Appointed Liberal Elite (the latter copyright R. Littlejohn). I do, however, feel some affinity with all of the above, belonging as I do to another group which has been scapegoated in the rightwing press over the last couple of years. You see, this morning a letter arrived on my doormat informing me I have been cleared to receive incapacity benefit. Flecks of spittle will no doubt be foaming from the corner of those of you who read the Daily Mail's mouths already.

Subscibers to the Rothermere, Murdoch and Desmond papers will, of course, already be aware that IB claimants are the greatest threat to Middle England since the Luftwaffe. After dark hordes of us roam the countryside, tipping over sleeping cattle and playing Knock Down Ginger. All of us are just skiving, really, and most supplement our sponging of the taxpayer by working as trapeeze artists. It's all the fault of the unions, or the EU, or something, who dreamed up the whole racket just to annoy respectable God-fearing homeowners with spaniels called Whisky and Soda.

The Labour government rose above this furore with its customary statesmanship by, er, doing exactly what the Tory press demanded. Last month the Department for Work and Pensions published a green paper on its plans to get one million IB claimants back to work. This will be achieved, we are told, by forcing the sickest people our society to attend "work-focused interviews", and take part in "work-related activity". If they don't, their benefits will be cut. Cemetary workers tending the grave of Aneurin Bevin last week reported hearing an odd spinning sound underfoot.

As you might have guessed, my views on this subject as somewhat different to those of the Daily Telegraph. After the bureaucratic nightmare I had trying to get my hands on my £57.65 a week, I have come to the conclusion that anyone who makes a successful claim should be automatically given an enterprise allowance grant. Quite frankly, if you're well enough to wade through the mountains of paperwork and jump through the various hoops demanded by the DWP, you're clearly far too healthy to be on benefits.

Today is exactly one month since my contract of employment ceased. In that time I have had to make umpteen visits to the jobcentre, because: a) a clerk in the payroll department at my former employers hadn't filled in a form properly (this happened twice), b) I had submitted the "wrong kind of bankstatement", c) the Royal Mail neglected to redirect my last two payslips from my London flat to my parents house, despite me paying them good money to do so, and d) I could not make head nor tale of the 100 page-plus applications forms. Without me running up lengthy phone bills to correct all of the above, I would still be out of pocket. Sorry if I was a bit slow on the uptake an everything, it might just be this brain tumour I've had removed.

After this Herculean battle with the state, it comes as little surprise that as much as £7 billion in means tested benefit goes unclaimed. I've had a rough enough ride of it, but I honestly do not see how someone who was iller than me and without the same support networks could manage to make a claim.

I'm not denying that reform is needed. With IB claimants only allowed the earn £81 a week for 16 weeks, it is tough to escape the poverty trap and find regular work. But look at it this way. Incapacity benefit currently costs the taxpayer £12.5 billion a year. The BMA estimates that, at most, 10 per cent of claims are fraudulent (so, with 2.7 million currently receiving IB, the government will have to force 730,000 geniunely ill people back into the labour market if it is to acheive its one million target). Conversely, corporate tax avoidance in the UK is estimated to run at between £25 billion and £80 billion every year. And guess what? Rupert Murdoch's News Corp paid no tax whatsoever to the UK exchequer during the 1990s. Maybe this might explain why his papers turn the spotlight away from the system being milked by the most powerful in society and, instead, pick on the very weakest and most vulnerable? It's the same the whole world over: it's the poor what gets the blame. It's the rich what gets the gravy. Ain't it a bleeding shame?

You know when you're making a strawberry milkshake, and you've just added some syrup to your half-pint glass of semi-skimmed, but you haven't stirred it yet? Well, you know you you get some electric-crimson streaks, plus some pink bits, plus a few islolated white patches? That's what my right eye looks like at the moment.

Anyway, that's why I've not been blogging much (or answering many emails) over the last week or so, and I'm off to Glasgow for a bit to have it peered at.

In the meantime, you might remember that I challenged y'all to find the badge at the top-left hand corner of this page. Well, an intrepid German reader managed it. Thank you very much indeed, whoever you are. As you can see, it now adorns my lapel alongside one I bought earlier, which helpfully reminds you a) my political affilliations and b) into which ear you should address me.

I'll tell you something for free: hospitals are boring when you're not tripping out of your nut on drugs. I'm just out of the Southern General again after an unexpected return visit from Tuesday to Saturday. While I was in there I was given the above sunglasses, which I reckon are quite snazzy in a Jackie Onassis/Bobby Gillespie type way.

This was all about my right eye. It's still an odd flourescent red colour. What it no longer has is a massive great ulcer on the cornea which formed over an abrasion. To treat this, the nurses blasted it with antibiotic eyedrops every half-hour for 48 hours. That's every half-hour round the clock, right through the night. Excuse me if I'm still catching up on my sleep a bit.

To see if the wound was infected, an opthamologist took a sample from the surface of my eyeball by scraping it with a sort of razor-type blade. Plenty of local anaesthetic meant I didn't feel anything, but regular readers will know that I'm extremely squamish about this sort of thing. So to my shame I found myself hyperventalating like a big girl. And I didn't have it as bad as the bloke in the bed next to me, who had to have an injection right into his pupil. As he pointed out, it's not like you can look away.

Anyway, the intensive torrent of antibiotics seems to have worked - the ulcer is still there, but it is very small, and receding. There will be some permanent damage, though. It'll leave a scar which will affect my vision on that side. Since I can't hear from my right ear either, my most important senses are now located on one side. As David Cameron will tell you, everything's moving to the left these days.

I'm off again shortly to see a specialist and check it's healing ok. Now we need to look at whether the gold weight is doing an adequate enough job of protecting my eye, or if this problem emerged prior to it being put in. Which means - urgh! - lots more people poking around it.

Anyway, I returned on Saturday to about 10 million emails, to which I have not even begun to start replying - apologies if you've been expecting to hear from me, I will try to clear the backlog this week.

Three cheers for the nanny state! Last night a glasses were raised in the headcase household at what today's Daily Telegraph calls "perhaps the most Draconian infringement of personal liberty yet imposed by this Government" and the Guardian's Simon Jenkins sneers at as "parliament's disinfectant self-righteousness". As a long-stading opponent of the so-called "war on terror" because, as the neocons will tell you, I hate freedom and my own country, it's reassuring to know that my fellow subjects' ancient rights are being further eroded by the interfering, do-gooding, self-appointed liberal elite who run this land. Except they don't, really, because that job falls to the sinister Brussels bureacracy who want to make us all speak Luxemburgish and eat straight bananas, or something.

Yes, our MPs have voted to ban smoking in public places in England from 2007, and I'm very chuffed indeed. Of course, a similar moratorium on tabs up here in Scotland is due even sooner, this spring, but it's gratifying to learn that if I return to London again I won't have to blink my way through fugs of tar every time I pop out for a half of mild. Health secretary Patricia Hewitt may not have endeared herself to the tobacco lobby with her Byzantine parliamentary about-turns, but she has surely secured the acoustic neuroma vote for Labour. From next year our exposed, unblinking eyeballs will need a little less artificial lubricant for every trip to the Rose and Crown, and if that's not enough to make me forgive Blair for bombing Iraq into chaos and anarchy I don't know what is.

My support for the ban, though it is clearly to my own rather narrow benefit, does predate me learning about my tumour, however. Initially I was vaguely opposed to it on instinctively libertarian grounds, uneasy though it made me to line up in solidarity with Big Tobacco. I felt it wasn't the state's right to interfere in our right to wreck our own health and, although not a smoker myself, I was worried a ban would contribute to the Wetherspoonsisation of Britain's pubs, with all the decent old grubby boozers being santitised and scrubbed clean of any character.

Then I went over to Ireland to visit relatives shortly after the Republic imposed its own ban. Expecting that the Irish would carry on puffing away as before (this being, after all, a country where obeying laws and regulations is a more or less optional activity, especially if you are a public representative of the Fianna Fail party), I was pleasantly surprised to find I was wrong. Co Mayo's best Guinness-pits remained as lively and disreputable as ever, only I didn't have to scrape several layers of soot off my clothes on the way home. Sure, a barman told me, there had been the odd teething problem - blokes returning from a gasper on the street outside to find someone chatting up their girlfriend, old boys having to be patiently told that pipes are not allowed, either - but in the main it was working. The national fabric had not been torn asunder. Tins still got passed round "for the boys", ploughmen still quoted Yeats, horses still lived on council estates etc.

And anyway, the libertarian argument against the ban was always a tenuous one. Liberties, as the American philosopher John Rawls put it, collide, and I don't see why one quarter of the population should dictate our environment to the rest of us. JS Mill's harm principle (damage yourself as much as you want, just don't damage anyone else) seems an appropriate enough benchmark of freedom. I am, let it be acknowledged, a drinker (or at least I will be again once my recovery is complete), and an excessive one at that, but my drinking doesn't damage the health of anyone other than myself, unless I'm employed as a space shuttle pilot or something.

Of course, there are the objections put forward against the ban by former health secretary "Dr" (not of medicine) John Reid, who infamously argued that "people from those lower socio-economic categories have very few pleasures in life and one of them they regard as smoking" . That this is a shameful indictment on his government for failing to end poverty rather than a decent pro-tobacco argument is obvious; but he is, at least, correct to say this is a class issue. After all, people in the lowest income deciles are not only far more likely to smoke, and thus far more likely to die of cancer, heart disease, bronchitis and emphysema; they are also overwhelmingly in favour of the ban, perhaps because the ravages of the tobacco industry are more apparant to those on the breadline than those on a cabinet minister's salary.

By the time the law comes into effect, my right eye will hopefully be working again anyway, so don't let it be said I'm arguing from a position of self-interest. Well, not entirely. Politically correct types like me just can't get enough of telling other people what to do, after all.

I spend my life in wating rooms and trains. At least, that's how it seems at the moment. I'm not complaining. After all, my incursions up the west coast over the past month have been because many dedicated professionals are trying to save my right eye. To all of them I'm grateful. But I have to admit, when I left univesity and emerged blinking into the real world, I didn't expect my life five years hence would revolve around sitting in carefully-disinfected outpatients lounges and riding the Scotrail "custard and blood" rustbucket through every station in Ayrshire.

Never mind the melodrama of illness. The experience of being a brain tumour patient can be summed up in two words: boredom and powerlessness. Boredom because you spend your days waiting to be seen, rereading that newspaper for the fifth time outside the surgery door, on the ward, or in front of the rain-spattered window in your house. And powerlessness because, although you are grateful for their expertise and care, your life and future circumstances are essentially in the hands of others. It's all a bit like going back to school, really.

My right eye is recovering after the Ulcer Attack. I've been told to put less antibiotics in it, so the redness is subsiding. But the cornea has still lost a big chunk from the surface, and we'll have to wait and see how much of my sight returns.

One of the many eye specialists who've been firefighting this little episode took another peek at it today. He wants me to have another operation: raise the lower lid slightly by inserting a stitch around the tearduct. It isn't disfiguring, or so I'm told. But it is irreversible. I asked if we could wait and see first: some of his colleagues have speculated that it might the micropore tape I was using to fix down the lid that inadvertantly caused the abrasion that led to the ulceration, and I've stopped using the stuff now. He's sceptical, though; reckons even if that's the case then the eye isn't getting enough protection. I'll obviously do whatever I have to in order to save the eye, but would rather not have an no-going-back op if I can help it. So he agreed to leave it a week and see how the eye recovers. Watch this space.

I was washing my hands in a hospital sink today and, when I glanced up at the mirror, I didn't recognise who I saw. It wasn't because of the palsy; that isn't apparent unless I smile. No, I saw a thin chap with cheap glasses, short, functional hair, and the kind of semi-beard that comes after a week without going near a razor. I saw what I would have taken to be a slightly nerdy computer science undergraduate who doesn't really care what he looks like. My image of myself - long-ish hair, no specs, clean-shaven - is my pre-op appearance. I thought beforehand the wonky facial nerve would have the biggest impact on that. How wrong I was.

While in hospital the other week I came across the following lines by English literature's foremost onanist, Eric Morcambe-lookalike and Dewey Decimal system expert, Philip Larkin:

... Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I'm not sure I go along with this. True, the cliche of victims of serious illnesses being automatically ascribed adjectives denoting fearlessness and fortitude has always been one of the most fatuous indicators of lazy journalism. A newspaper for which I once worked, I'm pleased to say, was rare in  that its style guide forbade military metaphors about sick children's "battles" and "struggles" with illness. Not only does this sort of sentimentality make those of us who just lay back and let the surgeons do all the hard work feel a bit left out. As John Diamond - whose lump was, unlike mine, malignant, and fatal - put it, such thinking implies more insidiously that "only those who fight hard against their cancer survive it or deserve to survive it - the corollary being that those who lose the fight deserved to do so".

Being confronted with incapacity or the prospect of death, or both, is no guarantee the coward will suddenly discover previously hidden Douglas Bader-like reserves of bravery. But the patient in such a scenario does have a choice. They can whinge, as Larkin suggests. Or alternatively they can make the best of a bad situation. This isn't courageous, or brave. In fact it's deeply selfish, in that the survival instinct is the ultimate me-first mechanism.

Whinging can be cathartic in the short term. But a really good moan - "It's so unfair!" - only works when its based on injustice. And when you ask, "why me?", logic replies, "why not me?" If your condition affects one in 100,000, why should another one of the 99,999 take your place? Because when you accept the futility of this line of thought, you realise that you do deserve everything that's befallen you - at least, as much as anyone else. 

The whinge serves ultimately to draw attention to the negative, to remind yourself of everything that's bad. In other words, it makes you feel worse. Getting on with things - because there's always, you tell yourself, someone worse off than you are - might mean burying one's head in the sand. But at least you have a better time of it down there. Unlike Larkin I'm not six feet under, so I won't challenge his assertion that death is better whined at than withstood. All I can say is the opposite is true when it comes to life. 

For want of anything better to do, I've grown a beard. I've been meaning to so this for a while, as some of you will remember: not because I ever thought it would look any good (and I'm haven't been disappointed, it doesn't) but since I won't get the chance again. Most workplaces, after all, would drive me out with flaming torches if I turned up in this state. Anyway, I realised last week I hadn't shaved for a few days and I wondered how I would look if I left it for a fortnight. The answer, as you can see above, is "like some sort of sex case". I'm getting the razor out as soon as I'm finished writing this.

The last chance I had to experiment with facial hair was at University, where most people (or those ones with highers and A-levels, at any rate) feel relatively at ease making fashion mistakes. Unfortunately for me, when I started writing for the student rag I found the bloke employed to pick up the paper from the printers and distribute it around campus shared my name. To distinguish us, he became "Jon Kelly with the beard" and I was "Jon Kelly without the beard". Had I grown facial fungus of my own, no-one would have been able to tell us apart and the whole enterprise would have collapsed. So I carried on using my blunted Wilkinson Sword. Well, every two or three days or so, as often I would be far too busy watching Neighbours and trying to get into crap post-rock bands to bother with grooming. 

I won't be sorry to see the back of the hair on my face, but I am relieved to see it return in bulk to the top of my head. After the operation my locks were shorn to the bone and there's always the fear, once you hit your mid-twenties, that they won't return again, or that if they do, they'll come back thinner and in a receding pattern. Thankfully, mine remain reassuringly thick - a state of affairs helped, I think, by the fact that as they grew no scissors thinned or layered or feathercut them, techniques all provided as standard now even by the grubbiest £3.50-a-trim men's barbers shops. Such are the emasculations of the age, but that's another matter.

Anyway, time for a shave. I've had enough of looking like Peter Sutcliffe.