I don't do science. Tell me how something works and I'll dumbly accept it, nodding with my mouth open, but rarely understand. I still can't get my head around the concept of atoms and, if I'm honest, I've never quite grasped gravity properly. To be honest, I'm still a bit skeptical about this whole Earth-being-round thing.

That said, I do have a few questions that have been nagging me recently that, in the absence of Mr Dineage (see above) from our screens, I thought some of my readers might be able to answer:

1. When I look in the mirror and adopt a neutral expression, my face looks normal. When I take a photo from the same angle, however, the palsy is apparent. Why should this be? Is my cameraphone the 21st century equivalent of the picture in Dorian Gray's attic?

2. To exercise the frozen half of my features, I gurn in various directions, which the aim of keeping the muscles taut. Recently I have noticed that my bottom lip seems to be twitching slightly on the palsied side. How can I tell if this is evidence of movement returning, or just the left side pulling on it?

3. How come you never see baby pigeons?

Yesterday I put three questions to you all which went way beyond my limited mental capacity. I received answers to two of them, for which I'm very grateful. A third, however, was probably unanswerable to anyone not actually looking at me: was a previously palsied part of my face starting to move, or was I just imagining it? So this morning I went to see Shirley, my physiotherapist, and asked her instead.

I lay on the bed while she peered intently at me. With my hand I held the left side of my mouth still so it couldn't move and appear to animate the right half by pulling it. And then a smile started to form across her face. "Oh yes!", she exclaimed. "There is something..."

You'd have to stare at me very closely before you noticed it. But there's no doubt it's there. When I tell it to do so, a small section of the right side of my lower lip starts to twitch. This I could not do before. In this subtle manner, it looks like the facial nerve is starting to work again.

Now, it's important not to get my hopes up too much. For all I know, this might be the limit of its recovery. Even if it isn't, it could be a long time before I see any further improvements. And this little spasm certainly doesn't make much difference cosmetically. But in nearly six months I have seen no movement whatsoever on one side. Now, however minute, however insignificant, something is starting to happen. It doesn't sound like much. But I can't tell you how much it has lifted my mood.

Every day since the operation I have stared at myself and looked for the merest hint of animation. Believe me, my features don't stand up to that sort of scrutiny at the best of times. So it has mostly been a depressing experience - especially as I know the longer I went without seeing any improvement, the greater the chance I'd be stuck like this.

I couldn't really be sure that what I was seeing really was a bit of the right side moving on its own. The area of my lip in question is maybe one centimetre across, situated right next to the devide between the palsied and the normally-functioning halves of the face. I could have been imagining it. Or it might have just been the left side pulling the right as its own muscles tensed. Or it might just have been wishful thinking.

What's pretty obvious is that this won't make any noticeable difference to the way I look. Until I can raise and lower the corners of my mouth my face will appear lopsided. Fair enough, I can wait. But it's the uncertainty of not knowing whether this waiting will be in vain that I can't be doing with. If I have to abandon any vanity and accept I'll always look a bit funny, then I will. But, obviously, I'd rather not.

As I've said before, I've got a reasonable chance of making this recovery - which, after all, concerns the wellbeing of my eye as much as it does my appearance. But I always knew this would come at the longer end of the timescale, and consequently my odds were lower than they might be otherwise. I'm not getting my carried away. But what I can see in the mirror isn't just a tiny flicker of my facial muscles. It's also a tiny flicker of hope.

This morning a stranger stuck a load of needles into various parts of my anatomy. Fear not, I haven't chanced upon a fetish club here in Dumfries. Nor have I started hanging with Pete Doherty. No, I was talked (by my mum) into trying out the ancient art of being stabbed with pins, or acupuncture as I believe it is sometimes known. After just one session I can already feel a seizmic transformation has overcome me. I now know what it feels like to be a teabag.

I've always been a bit skeptical about "complementary" and "alternative" medicine, preferring instead the kind that gets tested in laboratories and is subject to peer review. I may not know much about science, but I do have instinctive faith in the scientific method: reason, evidence, proof, all that sort of stuff. As Francis Wheen fulminates in his excellent defence of Enlightenment, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World: "there is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn't, medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that hasn't... if a healing technique is shown to have curative properties in double-blind trials, it ceases to be an alternative: it simply becomes medicine." I'm not a cultural relativist in either my politics or my ethics, so I don't see why I should be in terms of my healthcare either.

Specifically in terms of acupuncture, the clinical basis for its efficiacy is at best vague. According to one Oxford-based medical journal which surveyed its capacity for pain relief, "Most high quality studies either showed no benefit or that acupuncture was worse than control." That said, I'm certainly not squeamish about having needles stuck into me - when I was in hospital a nurse jabbed one into my arse every few hours. And I was at a bit of a loose end this morning, so it was either take up the appointment my mum booked for me or watch This Morning. As it turned out, I couldn't tolerate another moment in the company of Fern 'n' Phil. So off I went.

The acupuncturist himself seemed a sincere enough bloke, and I was impressed by his voluminous Columbo-style quiff. He didn't strike me as a charlatan, and took care to enquire diligently about my medical history. But I knew this wasn't for me when I asked what practical benefits the treatment would give me. "Well, acupuncture will facilitate a balance in you that will be conducive to healing," he replied. I can get that by laying off the booze and going for a jog each morning, I thought, and it won't cost me £35 an hour.

I'm quite glad I've had the experience, though, mainly in the hope that girls will think I'm dead hard (it's a fairly remote hope, but there you go). The pressure points around my body which correspond to my facial nerve, apparently, are my ankles, wrists and the tragus of my ear (you know, that hard bit that sticks out over the canal). Surprisingly, it didn't hurt when the pins were jabbed into these areas - with the exception of the ears, where I felt the only minutest momentary burst of pain. Like what you'd get from a tetanus jab. He then left me for 10 minutes, and I lay flat on my back and thought about what I was going to have for my dinner. Then he returned, told me to put my shoes back on, and asked for his money.

As yet I haven't noticed my face springing back into life, but I suppose I should be patient: I've had a balance facilitated in me that is conducive to healing, after all. And you don't get that hanging around with Pete Doherty.

They say time passes faster when you’re busy. I’ve always found the opposite is true. When I worked in newsrooms, the pressure of deadlines made every second precious: I had to get as much as I possibly could out of each one. Being at home has devalued that currency. I set myself a fairly modest set of tasks to get through each day – facial exercises, balance practice, answering my email, reading the paper. Somehow, by the time I’ve done them all, I’ve been taken from morning to evening. C. Northcote Parkinson famously said work expands to fill the time available. I wonder how long he spent on the sick.

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This law doesn't follow through to its logical conclusion, however. Having just a few things in the in-tray might speed up the clock. But the hands grind to a halt when you’re doing absolutely nothing. I’ve spent a fair proportion of my time in wards and waiting rooms, trying to make that magazine last a bit longer or reading and re-reading the notices on the walls. Being at the mercy of someone else’s timetable stretches the minutes and hours into infinity.

When I look back through this blog, I realize how imperfectly it records the passage of events. This is, of course, by necessity. I wanted a thematic rather than a chronological diary because, frankly, a straightforward account of what I did each day would be incredibly boring. Plus, key incidents – like going into hospital, or my ulcerated eye making it too painful to look at the computer screen – inevitably couldn't be recorded contemporaneously, while the mundane could always be covered faithfully. I like to think instead that I’ve given an impression of what it’s like to go on this little adventure, rather than swamp you with detail about which colour socks I wore on a particular Tuesday.

In fact, it is only with retrospect that the narrative of my recovery makes itself apparent. Rather than being distinguished by particular incidents, I’ve realized the months can be subdivided according to my expectations. In November I just wanted to sit up straight in bed. By December I hoped to shake off fatigue. The New Year saw me trying to walk unaided, while the hope of soothing my painful cornea continued into February. Since March I’ve found myself aspiring to the lifestyle of someone who isn’t off sick at all – going to pubs, meeting friends regularly, trying to look normal. In this endeavour I've had mixed success so far. But I’m starting to find the device of “Today I did activity X for the first time since the operation” is increasingly irrelevant to my experience.

Winter has come and gone, the leaves have fallen from and returned to the trees, and I’ve seen the nights shorten and lengthen again. More than anything I wanted this experience to be cyclical rather than linear, taking me back where I started rather than somewhere new and unknown. A round trip as opposed to an emigration. But now I’m getting to the stage where that journey looks like it might be almost complete. And the process of returning to normal life again seems at once a huge leap and the easiest, most natural step imaginable. 

Six months ago today I had my tumour removed. I can’t work out if it feels like far longer, or just the blink of an eye.

The latest headcase Order of Lenin medal goes to Carl Barat, the erstwhile "sensible one" in The Libertines (given that Pete Doherty was also in the band, this wasn't really saying much). Best known for booting his partner out of the group when the QPR-supporting tabloid-botherer's crack addiction became too much to bear, Barat is also the veteran of a benign tumour in his head. He's been fairly vague about what kind of growth it was - some articles say it was behind his ear, others on his neck - but revealed in this interview that it left him all but deaf on one side.

I wondered if it might have been a small acoustic neuroma, so, like a good journalist, I contacted his management company to check. A spokesman replied: "Carl’s tumor was a benign tumor in his inner ear drum, not his brain. Its safe to say his ear does not work quite as well as it used to, and does need to be checked up and emptied of wax and fluid from time to time, but other than that he has made a full recovery." So there you have it. A headcase exclusive.

Anyway, after a few months on his back last year recovering from both the removal of the tumour and the implosion of the Libertines (not to mention the spectacle of Doherty turning into indie-rock's answer to Alex "Hurricane" Higgins), Barat returned with his new band, Dirty Pretty Things. Yesterday they released their debut album, Waterloo To Anywhere. I was always rather partial to the Libs, so I went out and bought it. It's not bad, three stars out of five, nowhere near as good as his old group but consistently sort of, y'know, all right. Plus, it isn't the aural 9/11 that is Doherty's Babyshambles, whose abysmal Glastonbury performance I had the misfortune to witness last year.

Carl Barat: for proving that there is a place in rock 'n' roll for people with single-sided deafness, we salute you.

I tell you one thing about being on the sick: it isn't good for your health. Being stuck indoors all day is boring, and boredom makes you (well, makes me anyway) eat. Before you know it, you've got the girth of darts hero Andy "The Viking" Fordham and the council are telling you your gut needs planning permission. I mean, the only reason I'm writing this morning is to stop myself nibbling at the computer.

Keen to avoid the stigma of having both a heart attack and a brain tumour before my 30th birthday, I asked my physiotherapist what kind of exercise she could recommend to keep myself in shape. Pretty much everything, it seemed, was out: swimming might mean chorine getting in my bad eye, while jogging and cycling ran the risk of my precarious balance causing me to tumble under a lorry. Football was definitely off the agenda, what with all that changing direction at speed. It's a humbling moment in a man's life when he learns his footie career is definitely over, even when, like me, he was never very good at the game to begin with. That said, even in my present condition I could probably challenge for a place in Walter Smith's Scotland starting line-up.

She did, however, concede that I probably couldn't do myself too much of an injury if I joined a gym. This was slightly depressing news for me, as I've always hated such places. There's something very sterile and, indeed, emasculating about working out in this kind of artificial environment. "If you ever wanted proof that modern life has alienated you from your natural condition," the treadmill seems to mock you, "look around your local Fitness First: people so caught in the post-industrial urban dependence on technology that they need to create yet more machines to work off their man-boobs. Did your hunter-gatherer ancestors need to be given a programme to keep their abdominal muscles defined? Did they hell, they stayed trim by murdering their food with their bare hands. You're here because you don't exactly work up much of a sweat fetching a Rogan Josh ready meal from Sainsbury's on your way home from the office, aren't you?"

Whenever I've visited a gym in the past, I've always felt very self-conscious: the super-fit bloke on the exercise bike next to me is pedaling away furiously, while I'm wheezing away next to him like Bob Dylan choking on a Werther's Original. And, if I'm honest, I'm also quite competitive, which means I try to keep pace with whoever's alongside me, and knacker myself prematurely. Plus, there's something about revealing myself to a room full of strangers in a primal, perspiration-drenched state that I'm uncomfortable with, although that probably says more about my own hang-ups than anything else.

Anyway, I took the plunge and joined a fitness centre on the edge of town. It's fairly sparsely equipped. But if I get there mid-morning, I usually have the place to myself. Not only does this mean no-one can see me while I'm sweating away like Paul Gadd in Mothercare. I can also take command of the gym's small music system. No doubt most people like to listen to hi-NRG electro-pop to motivate themselves on the rowing machine. For reasons known only to my subconscious, I've been putting on stuff like Sittin' Pretty By The Pastels or Denim's Back In Denim while I attempt to complete my handful of sit-ups. Perhaps it is the perverse realisation that no-one will have played these in a health club before, ever, by anyone in their right mind, that has got me down there most weekdays since I signed up.

I'll get bored of it soon, I know, and I don't think I'll ever have enough motivation to earn myself a Hasslehoff-like physique. But as Mr Fordham will tell you, I'd be in much worse shape if I just stuck to the old Arras.

When I was about 16 or 17 my ambitions in life could be summarised as follows: get the hell out of Dumfries. It wasn't that the town I grew up in was especially deprived, or unsightly, or dangerous (at least not compared with the rest of western Scotland). It was, however, extremely boring. Two hours drive from the nearest major city, largely ignored by the rest of the country, it was and remains a backwater: poor shops, a dismal football team, and few cultural focal points. From my bedroom in Georgetown, a sprawling housing estate containing precisely one pub and thousands of identikit houses, I dreamed of escaping to what appeared to be the glamourous, Babylonian metropolises of Glasgow and Edinburgh. Anyone who has actually lived in either city will attest to how desperate I must have been to have formed this conclusion.

Throughout my mid-to-late teens, the highlight of my week consisted of attempting to get served in one of the boozers on Nith Place (not difficult, unless you actually wore your school uniform and a sign round your neck that read "I'm underage") and hoping there would be a decent fight to watch at kicking-out time. If I wanted to see live music, or visit a non-chain bookshop, or buy clothes from somewhere other than Burton and Next, I had to get my dad to drive me 75 miles up the M74. Add to this a backdrop of economic decline where wages remain 10 per cent below the Scottish average and the spectacle of empty shops has become an epidemic (thanks to Tom, an occasional commentator on this blog, for the latter link) and I knew I had to escape.

Unlike virtually every other part of Scotland, Dumfries and Galloway has no clear sense of its own identity. Think of Glasgow (Buckfast, sectarianism, Franz Ferdinand), the Highlands (hills, heather, midges), Speyside (whisky, fishing, rain) or even Dundee (jute, jam, the Beano) and you conjour up a host of associations. Dumfries, however, resonates with all the character and individuality of Lotus Notes. We had Robert Burns, except he was Ayrshire's, and he dropped dead just three years after arriving here. Or there's horror classic the Wicker Man, set in the Western Isles but filmed in Newton Stewart - a place described by its star Britt Ekland as "the bleakest place on Earth". Or there's the fact we can boast one of the highest rates of heroin addiction in the country. And, er, as Private Eye would say, that's it.

No doubt there was a degree of psuedo-elitism in my desire to leave (I fancied myself as an intellectual on the basis that I'd read Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto twice, and understood some of it). But since I moved here aged nine, I knew I wasn't alone in seeking a way out. From 1829, when Elizabeth Crichton's plans to fund a university in Dumfries were sabotaged by the five ancient Scottish seats of higher education - in an irony no novellist could invent, she built a lunatic asylum instead - Doonhamers saw education as a one-way ticket away from the town. As Dumfries's Wikipedia entry puts it, stagnation is worsened by "a noticeable number of inhabitants, many of a young age, emigrating to other parts of the United Kingdom to seek professional employment and further education". When I look at the Friends Reunited entry for my school year, the vast majority of my classmates got away at the first opportunity.

Well, I was one of them. After four years as a student in Edinburgh, the city of my birth, I didn't much fancy returning. Instead, like so many young Scots, I equated "getting on in life" with "moving to London". I packed off down to the capital and blended in with all the other rootless young irritants who make up its meejah industry. Insofar as I had any plans for the future, they consisted of sticking around the south-east for a decade or so to make my name before possibly moving back to the Athens of the North. Dumfries was like the mad woman in my attic - forgotten about, neglected, smelling vaguely of effluent.

So it's fair to say I didn't see myself, at the age of 26, returning to the Queen of the South. Still less did I envisage living with my parents so late on in life. I know that it is apparently now fashionable for twentysomethings (or the ones whose mummies and daddies can afford to continue bailing them out indefinitely, anyway) to act like Ronnie Corbett in Sorry!. But since 18 I always equated independence with having a place of my own. And for all that I will be eternally grateful to my folks for acting as a safety net when my tumour was diagnosed, I can't help but feel slightly belittled about returning to the nest at an age when half the world's men expect to have sizeable families of their own.

Still. After six months in Dumfries, I'm starting come round to the place in a way that I never did as a teenager. All the things I hated about it back then - the insularity, the lack of ambition, the smallness of scale - now seem thoroughly refreshing after the bewhildering maelstrom of activity that is London. If I want to get to the town centre, I walk there in 15 minutes, not pay through the nose to cram into an underfunded tube train. As I've said before, the capital was bad for my health - I spent so long commuting and working I had neither the time nor the energy to exercise and eat properly. And when I breath in the air, it is fresh and clean - I'm no longer inhaling the cocktail of soot, dust, exhaust fumes and Sarin that I had to negotiate down south.

For all that Galloway is ignored by the rest of the country, it contains some of the most incredible scenery anywhere in the UK - like a combination of Cornwall and the Lake District. Living on the very edge of town, if I'm lucky I might see and hear owls, rabbits, foxes, eagles and red squirrels, all before lunchtime. On my way to the gym in the morning I walk past a paddock containing a silvery-grey Shetland pony. If I'm not in a hurry I'll stop to feed her grass. I couldn't do that when I lived in Willesden Green.

Fair enough, my new-found affection for the place is contingent on me not sticking around too much longer. In anticipation of getting the medical all-clear I'm applying for jobs and doing the odd bit of freelance work (nothing that the DWP wouldn't allow, benefit snoops). And the sooner I return to my old life, the sooner I'll consider this little episode over. But the experience has given me an affection for my hometown that I never felt before. My 16-year-old-self would be appalled.