A couple of weeks ago I was in a nightclub in London celebrating a friend’s birthday. Towards the end of the evening I went to collect my jacket from the cloakroom. As I handed over my ticket a group of studenty-looking blokes approached. One of them gave me a quizzical look, stopped in his tracks and pointed at me. “Jarvis Cocker!”, he exclaimed. “Jarvis Cocker! JARVIS COCKER!”

Now, I was a bit worse for wear at this point, but I have to admit I was confused. I resemble the erstwhile Pulp frontman about as closely as I do Whitney Houston or the Treaty of Versailles. For a start I’m a good six inches shorter and, at the very least, a stone heavier than he; I am blessed with neither a Sheffield accent nor a dry, mordant wit nor the panache to make bri-nylon shirts look good. It occurred to me that the student type must have been on some sort of elaborate wind-up, and the only two possible dignified responses to his outburst - composing a fabulously witty put-down, or hitting him - were way beyond my powers at this stage of the night.

But then, through my alcoholic daze, I realised I had misread the situation. The student’s expression was not one of contempt but of genuine, elated admiration. With one hand he was giving an enthusiastic thumbs up. With the other he was pointing not at me, but at my glasses.

Now, I normally leave my vast black horn-rimmed specs in my coat when I visit a pub or club. They’re slightly too big for me and have a habit of falling off my nose when I’m dancing (or, indeed, talking animatedly, as is my wont in such states of refreshment). But on this occasion I’d left their case at home and was sporting them unselfconsciously. So I wasn’t quite prepared for fellow revellers to make the connection between my eyewear and that of Mr Cocker:

Certainly, I’m a great admirer of his. As this gnarled survivor of an adolescence forged during the dufflecoated 90s can testify, Jarvis stood out from the pages of the NME like a Paisley-patterned sore thumb: marrying lyrical dexterousness with deft showmanship and an unerring pop sensibility while the rest of indie rock was furrowing its monobrow and droning out platitudes. Common People was the great satirical masterpiece of Britpop - a searing blast of social commentary with its own Whigfield-style dance - and his eponymous solo album out last month is a return to form.

However, none of this was on my mind when I bought my glasses back in March. Although mildly short sighted, my number one priority with the purchase was to keep my wonky eye protected from dust and grit. Thus the frame I went for, a pair of sunglasses whose dark lenses were replaced with the clear prescription variety, are huge (although admittedly not quite as huge as Jarvis's): covering my eyeballs from beside and below as well as in front. Looking back, I was probably slightly over-cautious. It has become apparent that the gold weight in my upper right eyelid is doing such a good job that a more discreet pair of blinkers might have sufficed. Nonetheless, If I hadn’t gone for them I wouldn’t have inadvertently found myself at the vanguard of a fashion revolution.

This NHS-style design is one that has led to the debagging of a million school-age Elvis Costello lookalikes. But I swear to God, every time I wear my specs on a night out someone asks me where I bought them. It’s not like I can claim any fashion foresight in selecting them, but the novelty of at least appearing to be ahead of the style bibles hasn’t worn off yet. And, if nothing else, wearing a pair of huge bins like these distracts attention away from my palsied cheek (to my amazement, no-one has yet hurled any insults at me on the basis of my odd-looking face. I’m a bit disappointed, to be honest: I would have credited Britain’s binge drinkers with more front and imagination. If the Lindens clinic is to be believed they don’t have long left to get their act together. So I hereby issue a challenge to the nations drunks: show us what you’re made of. You have a proud tradition to live up to).

In the end I found myself shaking the student’s hand and directing him to the Perth branch of Vision Express before staggering towards my night bus. I’d like to tell you that I made my exit with a Cocker-like flourish, but both you and I know that would be less than truthful.

The nation's binge drinkers have so far failed to rise to the challenge, issued in my last blog entry, of coming up with some insults to hurl at me on the basis of my palsied face. Standards, clearly, are slipping. To lend them further inspiration, here as promised is a picture of me plastered with surgical tape like some kind of translucent Egyptian mummy:

The purpose of elevating my cheek and forehead in this manner is to a) give the muscles a bit of a workout and b) let them get used to moving out of their default sagging position in anticipation of nerve function returning. Generally I apply all this before I go to bed, meaning that, with Sparky also wired up to my head, not much skin on the affected side is left unexposed. This is playing havoc with my complexion: I currently look like the front row of a My Chemical Romance gig. As a result I'm yet to work out whether I look weirder like this or in my normal droopy state. A consolation is that having my face stretched this tight gives me an insight into what it must be like to be Cher.

With one eyebrow raised, and a slight smile playing at the corner of the mouth, I am lent an air of benign amusement. There are worse faces to be stuck with in the event of the wind changing, I'd say. Even in this fixed pose, my features suggest a whole gamut of expressions:

• Trendy vicar is introduced to teenage daughter's goth boyfriend;
• Prospective employer scans Lord Archer's CV;
• Broadsheet reader picks up copy of Daily Star in waiting room while car is being MOTed, affects not be enthralled by feature on I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!;
• Trainee teacher refuses to admit he has lost control of classroom;
• Sitcom mum shoots audience look of exasperation at fecklessness of offspring (played by a young Nicholas Lyndhurst);
• Pub landlord listens patiently to underage-looking would-be Bacardi Breezer drinker's explaination of why he's left his ID at home;
• Premiership manager reads pre-match assesment of himself made in press conference by Jose Mourinho;
• Music promoter steels himself to inform crowd of Babyshambles fans that Pete Doherty has been arrested on his way to the venue;
• How film critic hopes readers think he composes himself during screenings of sexually-explicit movies he routinely describes as "boring" (as opposed to how he actually looks while watching said flicks);
• Roger Moore attempts to act.

And many more which, I am sure, you will suggest...

Yet another unforeseen benefit of brain surgery: I've been able to spend more time than usual over the last 12 months with my CD collection. Since 2006 has been very good indeed for new music, I'd like to thank my tumour for its impeccable timing. Confident that you'll all be just as appalled as I am by the NME's frankly wrong annual poll, I present the sounds that have rocked my world this year:

Singles

1. Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop - Luke Haines
2. You Made Me Like It - 1990s
3. Crazy - Gnarls Barkley
4. Ali In The Jungle - The Hours
5. Gold Lion - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
6. Standing In The Way Of Control - The Gossip
7. Operated On EP - Union Of Knives
8. Steady, As She Goes - The Raconteurs
9. Whoo! Alright Yeah... Uh-Huh! - The Rapture
10. Country Girl - Primal Scream
    

 
Albums

1. Mr Beast - Mogwai
2. Black Gold - King Biscuit Time
3. Show Your Bones - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4. Bottoms of Barrels - Tilly and the Wall
5. Ringleader of the Tormentors - Morrissey
6. Voices of Animals and Men - The Young Knives
7. Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not - Arctic Monkeys
8. The Greatest - Cat Power
9. First Impressions of Earth - The Strokes
10. News And Tributes - The Futureheads

Down the road in Carlisle, today is known as Black Eye Friday . Traditionally, workers in the town get the last afternoon before the pre-Christmas weekend off so they can go to the pub for a fight. I'm buying all my presents on this side of the border.

It's been a funny old year, right enough, and I'll do my review of 2006 next week at the same time as all the papers. In the meantime, I intend to spend the next few days supping mulled wine, even though I can't stand the stuff, and eating turkey, although I'm not too keen on that either. Why can't deep-fried KFC-style chicken be the traditional festive poultry dish?

No matter, I'm determined to get into the season of goodwill. Even if it means emptying Dumfries of sherry. As such I'd like to thank everyone who has read my blog this year, and posted comments or sent me emails when I was going up the wall with boredom. To you all I wish a very merry and culturally non-specific Winterval (ha, let's see if I can earn an irate mention in Richard Littlejohn's column).

An earthquake shook Dumfries this morning . I didn't notice; I was in Next for the sale, and the room was already reverberating with bargain-hunters elbowing each other in the face. That doesn't say much for my powers of perception: 3.5 on the Richter scale and I'm distracted by a couple of middle-aged women wrestling over a half-price sweater.

It's appropriate that 2006 is ending with a bang, since it began for me with a whimper. I saw in the previous new year in on my parents' front room, the entertainment provided by The Big Lebowski on DVD and a lone dram of single malt. Just weeks after my operation, I was grateful above all else to be alive. But I vowed to myself that my next Hogmanay would include the elements that were missing from the occasion: the ability to function socially, the presence of people my own age, that kind of thing.

After 2005's moments of high drama - being told I had the tumour, the op itself - 2006 was, by contrast, notable chiefly for its mundanity. I began it taking life at the slowest possible pace, walking with a crutch, still slightly spaced out from the drugs and having had my brain fiddled with. I marked my progress via incidents that would normally have been routine: going for a pint, taking the train, being able to drive again. Each of them remarkable only because they marked "the first time since..." None of these events, by themselves, gave any indication that I had reached any particular stage of recovery. Yet by the summer, I found myself by most measures recovered: my balance restored, my thought process functioning and so on. Try as I did to record the build-up to this, it still caught me by surprise. There was never any fanfare. No-one jumped out of a cake to tell me, "You're well again." It just sort of crept up on me.

There were setbacks, of course, but none of them were particularly debilitating. The ulcer on my cornea did threaten to cost me my right eye, and looking back through my blog I realise this was the one point that I found myself succumbing to self-pity. But even then, what got to me (as when I found myself drowning in the bureaucracy of incapacity benefit) was not pain or discomfort but boredom. The physical demands of my experience were never all that great, to be honest. What I did find depressing - and I count my blessings that this was as bad as it got - was sitting in endless waiting rooms, at the mercy of other people's timetables. Brain tumours are not for people, like me, with short attention spans.

But the rest of 2006, my low-key year, was pretty enjoyable. I read a lot of books and got into a lot of new music. In the process of aiding my recovery I got myself fit and started running and cycling (annoyingly, I haven't been for a jog since I pulled a calf muscle three weeks ago, but I'm determined to keep this up). I enjoyed the sunshine during the long, hot summer, explored the countryside and watched every game in the World Cup. I know I'm not supposed to admit this, given that the appeal of sick-lit depends on pathos and confronting adversity. But I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Given the choice, I would do it all again.

I won't bore you all again with my views about how refreshing it all was to come off the career treadmill, because you've heard it from me before. And I continue to add the disclaimer that isolation from friends, the interruption of having any responsibility and purpose in life, are only things I could shrug off because I knew they were temporary. But the theme I've kept returning to in this diary is the idea that we only come by this realisation of truth, this knowledge of one's self, when we step outside our lives. Since the vast majority of us have neither the time nor the resources nor the inclination to do this, it takes a major setback before we are in a position to achieve this. That's why I thoroughly recommend going down with a brain tumour. It's just a question of learning to embrace the experience.

My story isn't finished, of course. There are still things that can be done to compensate for my defunct right ear. And though my facial palsy has made a partial recovery - I'm not drooping anything like I did at the start of the year - I look forward to offering photographic evidence that I look, to all intents and purposes, normal. But in light of everything that's gone before, I'm not expecting any kind of overnight revolution. Slow and steady has worked well for me up until now.

With the help of some people who know who they are, I've made sure that my resolution for 2006 will be realised. I'll be seeing in the bells this Sunday night in a cottage in the west country, getting legless with some old friends. Much as I'm grateful to my parents for all they've done for me, I'm sure they will be as relieved as I am that I won't be in their company on this occasion.

I can feel it, 2007 is going to be my year. I have news that confirms this. But I'll let you know all about it once we're onto the new calendar. Everyone's had enough earthquakes for the time being.