When you look at someone's face, what's the first feature you notice - the eyes? The mouth? The Charles Manson-style swastika tattoo on the forehead?
Because I'm weird, my gaze tends to fall elsewhere: on the creases between the top lips and the cheeks. Until fairly recently I wouldn't have paid these wrinkles any attention whatsoever. But I've started to realise how diverse and varied they can be. Some people have deep, furrowed grooves, like, I don't know, hangdog Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger. Meanwhile, others have such smooth, un-lined faces that it's hard to tell where lip stops and cheek begins, even when they're smiling. Well-known junk food advocate Gary Lineker, for instance.
It might not be a part of the body you'd spend much time thinking about, unless you're some sort of monomaniac wrinkle-fetishist (and believe me, contrary to what this blog entry might suggest, I don't go that far myself). But it seems to me that this particular crevice sends out all sorts of signals about our character. Would the great Walter Matthau have been so regularly cast as an old grump were he not so lined and drawn? Conversely, Cher 's surgically-tautened countenance earns her little but scorn, but would our misogynistic entertainment industry allow her to keep performing if she had the skin tone of John Prescott?
The reason I'm paying attention is because, unusually, each half of my face represents either extreme. When the removal of tumour caused my right-sided facial nerves to palsy, there was no line whatsoever there. On the left, however, the functioning nerves went into overdrive to compensate, making the muscle tone on that side taughter than Ken Dodd's wallet. Half of me looked like Joan Collins. The other half like Sir John Mortimer. It wasn't the best look I've ever sported, although it probably did beat the wedge haircut I had in the early 90s.
And now? With the nerve function slowly recovering, I'm starting to look slightly more symetrical. Very slightly. A veritable Grand Canyon remains on the left. Beneath the right nostril, however, a faint wrinkle extends for about an inch before fading out into a marginally-reduced droop at the corner of the mouth. Without wanting to give the misleading impression that I have overnight transmogrified into a matinee idol, the sagging is now ever so slightly less noticeable.
This week I took the train up to Manchester to have my facial nerves examined in the Lindens clinic once again. They're still progressing, slowly as ever. A sensation I thought was the active left side pulling on the flaccid right turns out to in fact be me being able to send a signal to the palsied cheek muscles. Admittedly this signal is still too weak to make anything happen, but still; if progress were to come to a halt, that would be me stuck like this, without the wind even having changed.
I know that compared to 99.99999% of the world's population I have nothing whatsoever to complain about. And of course I was very fortunate to come through the whole tumour thing as well as I did. But I still can't help feeling a bit frustrated at the pace of change. There are aspects of my life I feel it's wise to put on hold while I wait to halfway presentable. And for all I try to put the experience of illness behind me, I don't quite feel that resolution, or closure, or whatever the latest wanky psychobabble term is, will come until this final process is over.
On Sunday morning I'm going to try and get my tickets for Glastonbury. It would be better if I didn't have to bring Sparky, but needs must. At least I'd have something to keep me stimulated when the turgid likes of Bloc Party and the Kooks are playing.
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