Back up to Glasgow again yesterday to see the neurosurgeon who excised my tumour. Given that the last time I saw him I was in a drug-induced stupour, I wanted to take the opportunity to thank him properly.

There wasn't really much to discuss. Once you've spent 13-and-a-half hours fiddling around inside someone's brain, you've more or less done all you need to with them. So the consultation was pretty brief: "Any cerebral fluid dripping out your nose?" "No." But I'm looking in good shape, apparantly, and I've come through the whole experience pretty well; my scar is healing nicely, and it won't explode if I get on a plane. Oh, and the fact the tone in my facial muscles is holding up pretty well, with only a slight droop, indicates I've got a very good chance of getting to use the right side of my fizzug again, touch wood.

For all my fears and reservations before the op, I have to say the whole experience has been nowhere nearly as bad as I anticipated; that's one of the advantages of being a natural pessimist. The only downside, really, has been all this malarky with my eye. If it weren't for that I'd be looking at returning to work. As it is, I'm under close observation for the forseeable. Ho hum, gives me a chance to catch practice my sudoku.

That said, I was peered at by my "image consultant" yesterday, who said my knackered cornea is looking a bit better. In part his assessment was based on poking me in the eye with a twirled-up bit of tissue paper; he was pleased to see me wince in pain. This isn't because he's a demented sadist (necessarily, I don't ask about his private life) but because it means sensation is returning to the affected area. I couldn't feel anything there before, which meant I was at risk of not being able to respond properly if it was damaged in any way. So talk of another operation has been put on hold, for the time being, so long as things continue to get better rather than worse. I've got both sets of fingers crossed, although I can't remember from my playground days whether that's good or bad luck.

Last of all, I dropped by the ward where I was looked after following the op. Most of the nurses where there, and I'm eternally grateful to them in a way you can only ever be to people who have administered sizeable doeses of painkilling drugs to you. It's strange because I don't remember a huge amount about my time there, not on a day-to-day basis anyway; more just as a kind of blur of staring out the window and tottering around on a zimmer frame. But yesterday it all came flooding back: the elaborate ritual of going for a shower, the surrender of dignity, the crispness of the hospital sheets. I'll go into all this in another entry. But I hope everyone there knows that I'll never forget what they did for me.

I've another trip to the Southern next week to see another specialist: this visit should tell me a great deal more. I'll explain later. Keep watching this space...

I am currently sporting a new pair of "Gregory Pecks" (see above). Waddaya reckon? As you can see they match the horn-rimmed, Michael Caine-esque design sported a decade ago by every media twat east of Old Street with an optician's prescription. I have to admit, they are a stark indicator of how my values have changed: pre-tumour I would have rather got in the bath with Ian Huntley than put them on, for fear of looking like an ironic Nathan Barley type.

However, needs must. With my bad eye needing protection from the wind and dust, I've been reliant on a pair of crap £3.99 wraparound sunglasses from H&M. These keep my peepers well-insulated; they are also entirely useless indoors or after dark. In these circumstances I've been wearing my normal specs, a rather flimsy set which I bought for £25 from a shop in Cardiff and offer absolutely no defence against the elements whatsover.

I went on a nationwide hunt for the ideal set of frames. Actually seeing out of them wasn't all that much of an issue: I'm only shortsighted to the tune of -1.25 in one eye, and the damage wreaked by the ocular ulcer, in conjunction with all the ointment I have to put in, stops me seeing much out of the other anyway. No, my main worry was keeping the stoor and grit out. I was tempted to get the biggest, nerdiest, ugliest pair I could find - perhaps similar to those sported early in his career by Mr Costello:

This, I think, is a look I could have pulled off (although in Dumfries it probably would have got me killed). But size wasn't, in this case at least, everything: even the most gigantic, girl-repelling, TCP-reeking frames still let in gusts of air and soot through the sides. It looked like my only option was to get a set of clip-on protectors like these

which would have left me permanently looking like I was some kind of a woodwork teacher, and that really would have been too much for my ego to bear.

However, at what seemed like the end of the earth (Vision Express, 164 High Street, Perth) I finally found the holy grail of specs. The staff found me a pair of sunglasses which curve around the eye, with tapering arms at the sides keeping the wind out. The lenses were popped out, a clear set matching my prescription popped in - their contours are just enough so that the image isn't distorted - and hey presto! I look like Chris Evans.

I have news to recount, but it can wait until next week. In the meantime, a story in today's Scotsman makes me appreciate more than ever how lucky I was to have my tumour removed by a team of dedicated professionals:

'Drunk' surgeon arrested as he demands to operate on patient

A CALIFORNIA hospital's chief of neurosurgery was wrestled to an operating room floor by policemen and arrested after allegedly throwing a drunken fit when a nurse refused to let him operate, according to reports last night.

Federico Castro-Moure, 45, was arrested late on Monday at Highland Hospital on suspicion of being under the influence of alcohol and interfering with the duty of officers, Alameda County Sheriff's Lieutenant Jim Knudson told the Oakland Tribune newspaper.

Mr Castro-Moure became belligerent after insisting on operating on a man who broke his ankles and fractured his spine in a two-storey fall, according to the sheriff's department.

Two other surgeons had determined the injuries were not life-threatening, but Mr Castro-Moure insisted the man would die if he did not receive immediate attention, the report said.

He "threw a fit" and began yelling and cursing at staff when they told him equipment for the procedure needed to be transferred from another hospital, according to the newspaper.

When the surgical instruments arrived, a nurse refused to allow Mr Castro-Moure to operate until they could be sterilised.

Mr Castro-Moure threatened the nurse by punching his fist in his hand. He took a swing at deputies after they were called to intervene.

"Do you know that I am a (expletive) doctor, and I'm going to do what I want," he said, according to a witness quoted by the newspaper.

He was booked into Glenn Dyer Detention Facility in Oakland and was released several hours later, a jail official said yesterday morning.

Mr Castro-Moure was placed on leave while the hospital investigates the matter, hospital spokesman David Cone said.

A woman who answered the phone at Mr Castro-Moure's home yesterday morning said that the doctor had no comment to make.

What you see above is a momentous landmark in my recovery process. It's up there with leaving hospital, or getting my eye sorted, or learning to walk in a straight line again. After what seems like aons of sobriety, on Friday night I had my first pint for four months. And so, inevitably, I return to my pre-op degenerate lifestyle.

This isn't the first time alcohol has passed my lips since the tumour was excised: on New Year's Eve I had a single whisky. Nor was it my first trip to the pub with friends: I went down to London in January, and have sat in a few Dumfries boozers nursing a soft drink. But before now there's always been something missing - I've had my eye swaddled up, and I've been on orange and lemonade; or, on the one occassion I've tasted the demon drink, I've been nursing my tot of Auchentoshan in the house under nervous parental supervision.

I can't say I've missed booze. This surprises me more than probably anyone (although, given that I can sense your eyebrows rising as I type this, those who know me best might run me close in the taken-aback stakes). Before my operation, I tried to imagine life without the Devil's butterscotch: it was a tough proposition. No wino was I. But I liked a beer in the same way that Kate Moss liked Pete Doherty: knowing it was bad for me, regretting the damage to my health, but refusing to give up until I had no other option. I liked drinking; I liked being drunk.  I couldn't really imagine going on a night out and staying 100 per cent sober.

So it was a bit of a relief when I found I could give it all up. Admittedly, I had a bit of a leg-up - going into hospital, I didn't really have much choice other than to detox. When I came out I was slightly paranoid about headaches and exacerbating them, to the extent that I was wary even of caffine for a few weeks. And when it slowly dawned on me that my bonce had been stitched up pretty much perfectly, and the migranes I'd been warned about weren't going to appear, my first instinct should have been to head down to my nearest saloon bar and order a round. It was at this point I realised I really didn't feel like a drink.

It's not that the taste of a nicely-poured stout suddenly didn't appeal, or that the sensation of intoxication seemed unwelcome. No, I just realised that I was enjoying the novelty of waking up every morning with a clear head. Despite leading a far more sedentary lifestyle than that I had prior to the op, I'd actually lost weight. And everytime I met a friend, my bank account no longer haemmoraged into the pockets of some brewery that donated vast swathes of cash to the Tory party or whose corrupt bosses escaped justice by pretending to have Alzheimer's disease before "recovering".

And if I'm honest, there was an element of relief in discovering this. Alcohol had been a key part of my life since I was 15 and I don't think I'd ever gone more than two or three days without it since starting university. Virtually every social encounter for over a decade was lubricated with either the grape or the grain (or both); at work I was actually given cash in the form of expenses if I took the right people out and got them legless. In circumstances like this you start to wonder: what if I can't get by without it? What if I get the shakes? And when I realised that nothing would be more depressing that filling endless recuperation days with a bottle, I knew I was ready to go for that first pint. 

And so on Friday evening I walked into my favourite London pub with a group of friends, walked up to the counter and ordered a Guinness. The barman didn't pour it properly and I could tell that I'd got the dregs at the bottom of this particular barrel. Not that I cared in the slightest. I felt confident enough to start destroying my body again.

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Like Mr Yeats above (in the poem, not the photo; I don't think the old fascist was quite that agile), I've been mulling on the subject of balance. My own concerns have been with equilibrium in the literal sense, rather than the metaphysical, of course, and my conclusions a lot less pessamistic. Still, makes a change to see some vaguely literate text on this blog for once.

The whole unsteadiness thing was probably the weirdest thing about my tumour. Taking away my hearing, immobilising half my face, fair enough; you expect things to go wrong with your head when a four-centimetre hostile lump of cells invades your brain. But the ability to stay upright on two feet is not just something you take for granted. It's intangible, and you no more associate it with a particular part of your head than you do with your elbow or your big toe. Yes, of course your basic grasp of human anatomy tells you that the inner ear plays a pretty important role in the whole not-falling-over thing, but that's one of these explainations you acknowledge as scientific truth without ever quite understanding (like, for instance, the answers to "How do telephones work?", and "Why do you never see baby pigeons?").

I knew before the operation that my balance would most likely be affected. Taking away the nerve that wires up the cochlear to the cerebellum was always going to knock me askew for a bit. But for once, having a tumour at the humungous end of the scale actually did me a favour. According to this article, it seems the fact Ally had had long ago knackered the nerve's ability to communicate with my noggin meant the latter had already started compensating for the lack of information. Clever things, brains.

There's no doubt I got off lightly in this regard. I've had emails through this blog from former AN patients who had trouble staying upright for months after their operation. Most of them report walking down the street and seeing the buildings around them wobbling up and down (a sensation with which I'm all too familiar, although it's got more to do with necking too much Buckfast).

Not that it's been steady sailing all the way for me. For the first two or three days after the operation (as much as I can remember, anyway, that period is still a bit of a blur), it was a pretty big effort sitting up straight. This, admittedly, had a lot to do with the elephant tranquilizer-like drugs I was on, and the drain sucking fluid out of my spine. But I remember quite clearly being induced by a friendly physiotherapist to try and get out of bed. By the time I had manoevered my feet over the side I had vomited my lunch over both of us.

Once they unwired me from the assortment of catheters, however, I was desperate to get on my feet again. I remember the sheer innocent joy I felt when I managed to negotiate the neurology ward upright, aided only by a zimmer frame and an anxious-looking nurse. I progressed onto two crutches, and then a single one, and by the time I left hospital I was confident enough to pad about my own room unaided.

By the time I got back home it was clear my balance had not been too badly affected - at least by the standards of some patients. But I still didn't feel confident enough to leave the house without a stick, and the fact my leg muscles had atrophied after all that time in bed didn't help either. But I was getting there, and after about six weeks ditched the crutch for a golf umbrella. Nowadays I dodn't even bother with that.

The credit for all this has to go in large measure to Shirley, my phsyiotherapist (or "personal trainer" as I'd rather have it put). She's had me doing all sorts of excercises that seem pretty basic - walking in a policeman's line with one foot in front of the other, dribbling a football round some traffic cones - but, to my shame, caused me great difficulty at first. Some of them would trouble you, too. Get up from your chair and stand on one leg. Go on, do it now. Then, here's the tricky bit, shut your eyes. Try and keep it up for 30 seconds. Not as easy as you'd expect, is it?

Part of the problem at first was that, without the stick, I was veering to the right like a faulty Vauxhall Corsa as I walked. That's all cleared up now, but a few activities are still causing me bother - standing on one leg and bouncing a ball off the wall to my other side, for instance, although hopefully this isn't something I'll be called on to do much in real life. The other bain of my excercise regime was the wobble board. "What is the wobble board?", I hear you ask. The answer is: something akin to a mediaeval torture device, and it looks like this:

This contraption may appear easy enough to manipulate. But it frustrated me to my wits' end. Each week I would be challenged to balance on it for 10 seconds. Each week I failed miserably, crashing down to the side after a count of maybe two or three.

Until yesterday. I don't know what did it, because I don't particularly feel any more vertically secure than I did before. But for whatever reason, I managed to keep it up past the count of 10. Then the count of 15. And then the count of 20.

I know I'll never make a career as a trapeeze artist, and that abseiling is probably off the agenda for good. But the other morning, in a hosital in the corner of an obscure Scottish town, I felt like I was walking on air.

The inaugural headcase Order of Lenin medal goes to Hibs striker Dean Shiels, who returned to competitive action last night for the first time since having an eye removed in January. The Northern Ireland international was blinded on his right side at the age of seven during a gruesome accident with a wallpaper scraper; he kept his condition secret from team-mates until crippling headaches forced him to go to a surgeon, who told him the eye would have to come out.

I feel something of an affitinty with Shiels, as I came fairly close to losing one of my peepers shortly after his operation. I was also at Easter Road the weekend after his trauma was revealed to the public - the home fans showed their affection by singing "Deano" to the tune of Dexys Midnight Runners' Geno (Man Utd supporters used to chant something similar about Roy Keane, but I'm sure Shiels appreciate the gesture all the same).

Anyway, despite being told by doctors the rest of the season will be a write-off, he's back in action after lasting 65 minutes in a reserve game against Motherwell, complete with a coral implant filling the socket (he will have a cosmetic contact lens placed over it at a later date). Now, amazingly, he's in contention for a place in next week's Scottish cup semi-final against Hearts. If he comes on at Hampden and bags the winner, he'll have realized a proper Boy's Own storyline - not just sticking one over the maroon hordes' spiv of an owner (their sex-case manager was vanquished today, hurrah), but winning a victory for everyone who's sat in a hospital refusing to feel sorry for themselves.

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?"