I've just spent the last few days in the north west of England. I swear to God the rain came on as soon as my train entered Lancashire. On Saturday and Sunday I was in Liverpool, where Green Dave showed me the following plaque:

Yesterday morning I tried to ignore my Guinness hangover and went through to Manchester, or, more accurately, Sale in Cheshire. This suburb houses the Lindens Clinic, a private medical centre specialising in facial palsies. It is run by Ms Diana Farragher OBE, a physiotherapist who had a key role in designing the very trophic stimulator with which I electrocute my face. She is to drooping cheek muscles what Lavrentiy Beria was to Trotskyism.

A key component of her technique is electromygram (EMG) testing. What this means in plain English is that she sends a signal along my nerves to see how much they work, and how far they have recovered. I have to say that I was very curious to know how this would work out. When you stare at yourself in the mirror trying to lift the corner of your mouth, and nothing seems to be happening, you start to wonder what's going on inside there. Is the nerve growing back? Is any kind of signal, however weak, passing through it? Am I doomed to continue semi-sulking for the rest of my days?

I know I'm straying from the theme of this blog, but I can't let the death of Arthur Lee go unremarked. He was an extraordinary talent and, since the sixties, an influence on every songwriter who was any good whatsoever. I was fortunate enough to see him live a few years back and, despite everything he'd been through, he was still on incredible form.

RIP.

In a bid to confront popular prejudice, the newspaper Disability Now last week listed the UK's 25 most influential disabled people. At the top of the pile, beating off competition from Stephen Hawking, Tanni Grey Thompson and the BBC's Frank Gardiner, was chancellor Gordon Brown. You may or may not be aware that Kircaldy's second most famous son sports a glass eye (in common, interestingly, with BNP leader Nick Griffin) after a rugby accident aged 16. Whether or not you share his views on PFI or Trident, I'm sure none of us would doubt the scale of Brown's achievement on a personal level. Not only does he control the nation's purse strings, but I'm told that his apparently brooding, Heathcliffian manner is deeply alluring to the ladies. Seriously, I know of a flat of girls in London who spend their evenings gazing longingly at a photo of him blu-tacked to their living room wall, as though he were Justin Timberlake or one of Bros.

There was only one slight problem. Brown himself doesn't actually reckon he's disabled. He was, a spokesperson told the BBC, "a bit surprised to be nominated because he's never really considered his eyesight to be a disability". A dissenting faction within DN's nominating panel agreed with this and protested strongly against the decision to include him on the list. Not being able to see out of one eye might be limiting in certain ways - Brown would never get a job as an RAF fighter pilot, for instance - but can it be usefully compared with paraplegia, let alone full-on blindness?

I've been thinking about this recently myself. The other day I was filling in a form which asked me if I had a disability. To be honest, I didn't know whether I did or not. I'm deaf in one ear, which is not in the least debilitating unless I'm in a very noisy pub. The only thing I can't actually do, because my directional hearing is shot, is work out where my mobile phone is when it's ringing. And more often than not this is a blessing in disguise. The Disability Discrimination Act says I'm disabled if I have "a physical or mental impairment which has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on his ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities". Well, that doesn't sound like me, just like Gordon Brown doesn't seem to think it sounds like him either. Let's be charitable and assume he didn't just foreswear the label because it wouldn't go down well with the focus groups.

But not everyone sees it this way. According to the BBC, single sided deafness (SSD) "has a particularly disabling and debilitating impact on work, home and social interaction" for sufferers. This is undoubtedly true in many cases. Because my hearing deteriorated gradually, I was able to adjust quite easily; when its onset is sudden, however, it can be incredibly disorientating. Moreover, it was quite straightforward for me to adapt my lifestyle and choice of work to its appearance. If I were a barman or a sound technician, however, I'd almost certainly have to change career. Clearly the parameters of disability are determined not just by symptoms but also by individual context. To me, SSD is less limiting than, say, diabetes or colour blindness. That doesn't make it any less severe to others with exactly the same condition for whom other cards have fallen differently.

So if disability is, at least to some extent, self-selecting, I need to decide whether I'm in or out. The late, great Ian Dury, crippled by polio, would urge me to show solidarity. "I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus, I'm spasticus artisticus," he sang/barked, like Kirk Douglas on crutches. "I dribble when I nibble and I quibble when I scribble. Hello to you out there in normal land. You may not comprehend my term or understand."

But while I quite like the idea of having social licence to shock people in this manner (not to mention maybe getting into the bargain a sticker to let me park nearer the entrance to supermarkets), I'm not sure I could pull off Dury's attitude. Put me next to Christopher Reeve or Helen Keller and I'd look a right fraud. To talk of "disability" as a common experience ignores its basis as a broad continuum. Admire Gordon Brown for not letting his glass eye stand in his way, but it was hardly as much of an obstacle as those faced by Hawking. And, conversely, most acoustic neuroma patients I've been in touch with have told me it isn't being disabled or incapacitated that has presented the condition's biggest challenge. Being disfigured, after all, doesn't  stop you doing anything, but for many ANers its impact is far more traumatic than those symptoms which actually do.

DN's intention was presumably to encourage understanding the disabled. Because of the confusion thrown up above, not to mention the impossibility of arriving at a holistic definition of the term, I suspect it will do the opposite. The last thing I want to do is retreat into the miasma of identity politics, where each oppressed group demands their share of the cake - as a disabled person, as a woman, as a member of an ethnic minority, as a gay man or lesbian. Surely it makes more sense to recognise that everyone's needs are unique because everyone is unique, and more than just a sum of ticks in boxes.

That seems a positive enough note to conclude this, the 100th entry in my blog. I really need to find a new hobby. I was thinking I should maybe take up watercolours, or learn to juggle.

Deferred gratification? I tend to prefer the instantaneous variety, thanks. Given the choice between, say, going for a 10-mile run or gorging on a plate of sticky buns, I'll always plump for the latter. My attention span is too short to focus on long-term goals when I could just get a sugar rush from guzzling loads of Haribo sweets. Welded to sedentary, office-based work and a declining metabolism, it's fair to say my general fitness was not at its peak during my middle twenties. In the same way that it's fair to say that General Pinochet was not the most enlightened twentieth century head of state, or that Hezbollah and the Israeli government haven't really been getting on too well recently.

Yet somehow over the last couple of months I seem to have become fit by accident. This is all the more suprising when you consider that in hospital I was stuffed full of girth-expanding steroids, and kept my hobbling about on a crutch to a minimum in the months immediately thereafter. Yet looking down at my torso today I see that it is relatively streamlined, without the unsightly bulges of a year ago. I can only conclude that having a brain tumour is extremely good for one's health.

To be fair, I have been going to the gym fairly regularly despite myself. I joined a sports centre when my balance had more or less tipped back to equillibrium and my sedentary lifestyle was making even someone as lazy as I feel a bit stale. My priority wasn't developing a washboard stomach or fitting into a tight t-shirt without looking like a sack of jellyfish. I just wanted to use my muscles, wasted by months of inactivity, for something other than wandering down to the chip shop and back.

At first it was sore. I wheezed my way along the treadmill like Rik Waller with emphysema. I raised weights above my head with all the strength and virility of Jarvis Cocker. It bloody hurt. For days afterwards my joints would creak and groan as though they were rusty doors. But gradually it became bearable, and then not too much bother, and then actually quite enjoyable. I've found I had reserves of stamina I never developed sitting behind a desk and eating Wagon Wheels for lunch. I can fit into t-shirts I haven't worn since university. I need to get new jeans because my old ones are now too big for me, though, so financially it's a zero-sum game.

I'm not saying this to get the attention of the ladies or anything. My frame may now be healthy but it isn't what you'd call buff. I wouldn't get into a boyband or owt. It's less my appearance that has benefitted as my general wellbeing. I'm suddenly feeling a lot more energetic, and getting much more done every day. I know my old lifestyle was a vicious circle: long hours plus commute equals knackered, equals eating crap food and going to the pub instead of working out. Equals even more knackered. And so, it seems, I needed something like a friendly tumour coming along to break the cycle.

If I was writing this for a downmarket title like Bella or Take A Break or the Daily Telegraph, the line would be something like: "My brain tumour made me appreciate my health and start working out." Well, sod that. There are two main reasons why I've been able to sustain my uncharacteristic quasi-fascist ardor. One is that I'm currently my own boss. And as an employer I tend to be extremely liberal, almost to a Scandinavian degree, in my industrial relations policy. If my workforce asks for time off to go down the gym when it's quiet (or, indeed, listen to Radio 4, or wander about Dumfries High Street, or stick its own name into Google) I tend to adopt a rather more enlightened approach than the CBI would reccommend. Looked at more bluntly, I'm able to use exercise as a work-avoidance strategy, which I wouldn't really get away with in the real world.

The other key factor is that being removed to the middle of nowhere has taken away the temptation to go down the pub. In London there would usually always be someone I could call upon to meet for a pint if I had enough pennies on any given evening. My old work actually gave me expenses to take people out and get them drunk (I've worked for newsdesks who would tell me to nip downstairs for a couple of jars while they looked over my copy; I'm thinking about listing "can file while legless" above 100wpm shorthand on the skills section of my CV). As I can't stand lager, I usually frittered the company's profits on Guinness. Contrary to what the adverts tell you, it is not good for you. I had the waistline to prove it.

If I return to metropolitan living again (and I've got the glasses for it these days) something will have to give. Whether it means cycling to work, or giving up booze during the week, or both, or more besides, I don't know. I don't want to give up cakes and stout. But I am going to have to balance that with some form of regular exercise. Maybe I can get another tumour from somewhere to spur me on.

Like Freddie Mercury, I want to ride my bike. A purple Raleigh 20-speed contraption, it kept me amused through my adolescence in the days before the invention of modern teenagers' pursuits like MySpace and self-harming. It accompanied me on a very enjoyable holiday to Centre Parcs when I was about 13. On another occasion, I fondly recall nearly landing on my unhelmeted head after braking sharply to avoid crashing it into a stray sheep which jumped out in front of me somewhere between Dumfries and Dalton. Sadly, it has spent the last few years in the shed, accumulating rust and cobwebs like my own personal picture of Dorian Grey, except as as it decayed I grew corpulent and arthritic for want of using it, so that analogy doesn't work really.

My desire to get back on two wheels has nothing to do with the conventional motivations of cyclists. I couldn't care less, for instance, that it is apparently good for the environment. So is eating mulch from the back garden and making clothes out of potato peelings. Since I don't have a car my carbon footprint must be toddler-sized anyway. Nor am I particularly bothered about the health benefits since I started going to the gym by accident. I am, however, put off the bike on account of the fact it is currently endorsed by Keith Allen's brat on one of her tune-free nepotism-fests. I have always, also, had some sympathy with the great curmudgeon PJ O'Rourke's seminal treatise A Cool and Logical Analysis of the Bicycle Menace. "Bicycles have their proper place," the Cato Institute research fellow writes, "and that place is under small boys delivering evening papers... All you can do with one of these ten-speed sink traps is grow tired and sore and fall off it." As someone who is both lazy and vain, I have never found a model designed with me in mind.

Indeed, I have my own reason for being suspicious of the contraption. Riding a bike involves maintaining poise and equilibrium, a function my tumour did its best to undermine. As you may recall, it was growing on the nerve and pressing against the bit of the brain that govern balance. Although several months of physiotherapy have ensured I now stay vertical for as long as I want, I do worry that I'm tempting fate a bit. As activities go, it is surely not far off signing up for tightrope-walking lessons in the asking-for-trouble stakes. "It's a bit like riding a bike," idiots often say when describing some skill or knack. "You never forget how to do it." What nonsense. I'm willing to bet developing Alzheimer's disease, for instance, more or less scuppers your chances of ever donning a yellow jersey.

There are two factors, however, that tempted me back into the saddle. The first is that Dumfries was the birthplace of Kirkpatrick Macmillan, inventor of the velocipede, and his restless soul is surely compelling me from beyond the grave to start riding again. Another is that I have just read the greatest and most inspiring work of sick-lit ever, Lance Armstrong's It's Not About The Bike. In a narrative that makes this blog looks like an extended whinge about a minor paper cut, champion cyclist Armstrong tells how he contracted testicular cancer which spread to his lungs and brain. Despite being given a 40 per cent chance of survival, just 16 months after completing grueling chemotherapy he won the Tour de France. In its fastest-ever time. And, shortly afterwards, became a father.

There are too many passages in the book worthy of quotation, and I'm wary of in any way conflating myself with Armstrong - who beat a far more serious illness than mine, and achieved greater athletic prowess than I can ever dream of. But two passages leapt out at me. One compares the grind of long-distance cycling to overcoming illness, after his recovery gave him the mental capacity to stretch himself to his physical limits: "What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won." The other tells of passing the finishing line at the Champs Elysees and claiming cycling's ultimate prize. His team-mates were all clutching apples. As if to tell his cancer, How do you like them...

I will, of course, never achieve such giddy heights on two wheels. But how could I not be inspired to take the old Raleigh in for a service and start riding again after reading that? As it turns out, the balance thing isn't a problem after all - I've been out several times now and have yet to tumble onto the paths of any articulated lorries. At least one aspect of my riding has changed since my callow youth, however. I always wear a helmet these days. Not only am I less bothered about what I look like. I'm somewhat more sensitive to the after-effects of having my head split open.