My latest role model is "Sir" Mick Jagger. Here is a man who has amassed fame, wealth, and the status of being one of the all-time great frontmen, whilst looking as though he has not one but two facial palsies. I've been practicing his moves in front of the mirror, but if I'm going to pull them off I'll need to lose about half my body weight.

I'm not so keen to emulate the trajectory of "Sir" Mick (sorry, I can't take the title seriously) from Street Fighting Man to centre-right pillar of the establishment. But there's no doubt the soundtrack to my tumour would be considerably Stones-heavy. When I was in hospital, one of the senior nurses on my ward was called Angie. She was a tough wee Glasgow woman with an Ibrox season ticket and (she told me herself) the nickname "The Rottweiler". Her fearsome reputation was, however, marshaled exclusively into making life more comfortable for her patients (she apparently struck fear into the hearts of the ambulance crews). I saw nothing but kindness from her and we spent a great deal of time blethering about the music of Mr Robert Zimmerman. It must have been apparent I was getting back to my old self when she arrived with a trayload of tablets for me one morning, and I began crooning, "Angie... Ay-yan-jay... When will those clouds all disappear?"

I also feel an affinity with Keef after his own recent brain surgery. The old goat proved once and for all he is indestructible after splitting his head open falling from a tree in Fiji where he was foraging for coconuts. It sounds like a tableau felt-tipped onto the helmet of Man With The Stick from Vic Reeves' Big Night Out (especially as his partner-in-tropical-fruit-picking was Ronnie Wood). But the accident caused a blood clot in his head which required an operation to sort out; thankfully, our hero is recovering nicely. Keith Richards is 62.

As you can probably tell, I've got loads of stuff I should be doing today instead of writing this nonsense.

I am on the train from Carlisle to London. The sun is shining, the weekend is ahead of me and (amazingly, given that I’m travelling via Virgin Rail) the service is on time. I’ve bagged a four-seater table to myself and I’m in a good mood. Sod it, I think, I might as well. Who cares who’s watching. Time to dig out Old Sparky. 

I reach into my bag, pull out my facial stimulator and its associated paraphernalia, and start tearing off strips of tape. No-one is looking at me, not yet. Not the heavily-perspiring businessman to my left who boarded at Preston and is jabbering into his mobile about how Alison from Accounts is bloody useless. Not the bored-looking woman pushing the drinks trolley down the aisle. Not even the wee boy clambering over the back of the chair in front of me. But they will be soon, I know it.

While being freed from the pressure of conforming to society’s notions of physical attractiveness is probably on balance a good thing (I was never the sort to use moisturiser in the first place), I don’t hold with the argument that not caring what other people think you look like is entirely positive. Yes, everyone should be free to look and dress how they want. No, I don’t like the way so many people (mostly female) have their self-esteem torn asunder by unattainable strictures from the fashion industry. But at the same time, self-consciousness depends on a sense of self-awareness. And, believing that there is such a thing as society, I don’t want to abstract myself altogether from the rest of the world. I’m getting perilously close, I realise, to becoming an eccentric. And I don’t want to turn into Edith Sitwell.

But then, I tell myself as I start fastening the wires to my face, I’m doing all this out of a sense of distorted vanity. After all, my intention is to one day look vaguely presentable again. What’s changed, I realise, is my sense of priorities. I would have worried in the past what strangers think of me; true, I don’t any more, but that’s because I’m much more concerned about those people to whom I am close. And the experience of coming through this little adventure has given me, I suppose, greater self-confidence. Never mind national service. Give every 18-year-old a brain tumour. That’ll make a man (or woman) out of each of them.

I switch on the machine and feel the electric charges silently pulse through my skin. Across the aisle on the adjacent table, the man with the mobile is casting me a curious sideways glance. Ah, let him look. I’d wonder what I was up to if I were him. Anyway, I can’t take the moral high ground here. The other week I saw a bloke about my age walking down the street on crutches with one hand and one leg missing. He was about six inches taller than me, expensively dressed in smart-casual, hair cut very neatly, looked well-to-do. I started to fill in his backstory. He was a young army officer, I decided, not long out of University, who had an unlucky encounter with Iraqi insurgents. He joined up out of a sense of duty, or a desire for adventure, and got more than he bargained for. How is he coping, I wondered. Has he rationalised his setback in the same way as I did mine? Then I realised I was gawping at him, and averted my gaze.

The little boy is still climbing on top of his seat ahead of me. He gives me the briefest look, sums me up, and doesn’t bother again. I won’t interest him too much, I realise. At his age there’s far more weird and wonderful things to take in. Like the strap of my rucksack swinging from the luggage rack, for instance, which seems to utterly captivate him.

The drinks trolley comes to rest in front of me. Do I want anything, the stewardess asks me. I scan her face for signs of curiosity. She’s not quite sure what to make of me, I can tell, but far too busy and distracted to dwell on the subject for long. It’s a healthy reminder that the pressures of advanced capitalism mean people are usually too wrapped up in their own lives to ever get too intrigued by mine.

“Aye. Coffee, please. Milk, no sugar.”

I take the cup and hold it to my lips. The wires from the electrodes are dangling in the way. It’ll go cold, I realise, before I can drink it. Oh well, I say to myself, never mind. The sun is shining and the weekend is ahead of me.

Not having to go to work can be a depressing experience: without the affirmation of human contact or the structure of deadlines, you become bored as well as lazy.

When, however, it is 26 degrees outside, and you're sitting in the back garden with your books and iPod waiting for the World Cup to start, the absence of a nine-to-five office job is slightly less of a drag.

There's an article I'm meant to be writing sitting unfinished on my laptop. If the weather stays like this, I can't see much chance of it getting completed before July 9th.

Yesterday I received the following letter:

For those of you who don't speak jargonese, this translates as follows: I'm allowed to drive again. Entirely understandably, the DVLA requires everyone who has had their head cut open to ensure their continued suitability to use the roads is verified by a surgeon. Equally reasonably, my insurers were also anxious not to let me on the Queen's highway until this was done. The medical verdict was a foregone conclusion. But the cogs and wheels of bureaucracy took several months to wheeze into action, in which time I could probably have set about breaking the land speed record if I'd put my mind to it.

I'm not entirely sure I want my licence back. It's got a photo of me on it sporting a straggly curtains hairdo like a 90s boyband member. This is far more disfiguring than any facial palsy and I would have been glad to have seen it excised from my wallet for good.

There's also the fact that, since I hung up my car keys after my tumour was diagnosed, Britain's roads have been far safer. To be honest with you, I'm a terrible driver. I passed my test only on the third attempt, and according to the examiner (a huge, terrifying, monosyllabic, bullet-headed Kojak lookalike named Mr J Hardacre) this was by the skin of my teeth. I failed the first time after notching up scores of minor faults. The second time I went through a red light. My parents, who funded my lessons as a 17th birthday present and saw their bank balances haemorrhage accordingly (I didn't pass until I was 19), didn't know about this last detail because I was too ashamed to tell them. They will now.

There are plenty of other reasons to hate the car: its environmental impact, the vast yearly death toll for which it is responsible, those stickers on people's rear windows which read "Baby on board" (which always infuriate me - is the logic of this that I should go and ram a busload of pensioners off the road instead?). Most of all, I have many tedious memories from my last job of sitting in endless snarl-ups on the North Circular, having to listen to bloody Coldplay or Athlete on XFM because I forgot to bring any CDs.

The combination of young men and the internal combustion engine is always a dangerous one. Here in Dumfries we are plagued by what are known locally as "the car boys", post-adolescents who blow all their wages souping up their Ford Escorts for the purpose of racing each other up and down the Whitesands of a Friday evening. A friend of mine while at school bought an old banger from a mate for £35 during his dinner break, and after lessons took it rallying through the lanes and fields of rural Lancashire. His escapade came to a halt when he ploughed it into a river.

All this notwithstanding, I'll admit to feeling a twinge of liberation at getting my licence back. Whether I like it or not, my perception of the car is indelibly marked by the rock song, an idiom which has always equated open roads with freedom and adrenaline. Mr Zimmerman on Highway 61, Mr Springsteen on Thunder Road, Kula Shaker on the A303 to Glastonbury (I've even got the last one somewhere, it's appalling) - even if I'm not going to get my kicks on Route 66 anytime soon, I can always take the coastal route to Palnackie and pretend.

So last night I borrowed my mum's Ford Ka and drove into town. Amazingly, I didn't stall it once, which is actually suggests my dexterity behind the wheel has improved as a result of the lay-off. I don't think I'm quite up to reversing round corners or parallel parking yet, mind. In the meantime I'll just have to keep out of Mr Hardacre's way.

This morning, while filling in a form, it took me a good five seconds to recall my own name. This is unacceptable. I wasn't even hungover. And it's not like I've got a particularly complicated moniker: that of Ahmet Emuukha Rodan Zappa, one of Frank's sons, for instance, or Lord St John of Fawnsley (it's the pronunciation of the last one that gets me every time).

I've come to the conclusion that there is too much stuff in my head. At 26 years of age, my grey matter has become saturated. Every time I learn something new, it squeezes out something old. So I can recount in tedious detail the match statistics for yesterday's Brazil v Australia game, but as a direct consequence I've forgotten how to tie my shoelaces.

It strikes me that I've missed a great opportunity here. When I had a team of surgeons digging around inside my cranium to remove my tumour, I should have got them to excise a few other things besides. Here is my list of stuff I really wish the doctors had taken out of my brain:

• Whatever reflex it is, whenever I hear the line "Severin, down on your bended knees" from Venus In Furs, that makes me think of Aberdeen, Hearts and Scotland midfielder Scott Severin crouching at the front of a team photo;
• The futile hope I still entertain whenever I rent a video or DVD that Simon Bates will have been brought back to explain the British film classification system before the feature and warn against the presence of "sexual swear words";
• The memory of a girl in my class declaring smugly, the morning after the 1992 general election, "I'm really pleased the Tories won" (an event which contributed more than any other to my politicisation and still fills me with cold, murderous rage);
• Cliff Richard's guerilla gig at Wimbledon in 1995. STOP THINK OF SOMETHING ELSE BLOCK IT OUT PLEASE;
• The grim detail of John Prescott's recently-exposed "romantic" life;
• My most embarrassing moment: the time I was sick all over the London underground. I was queasily taking the tube to work the morning after a particularly grim office Christmas party. As we pulled into Green Park station I realised my stomach could withstand no more. I bounded through the doors as soon as they opened and vomited copiously all over the platform. What emerged was, strangely, the colour and texture of Ambrosia. After a good few minutes of heaving, I looked behind me. The train was still there, and all the people I'd been sitting alongside were staring at me in horror;
• That bloody awful Sandi Thom single. It's one of the worst songs I've heard in my life. It's worse than Sussudio. It's worse than Mysterious Girl.