"Oi, mate. What's wrong with your face?"

In an earlier instalment I challenged the nation's drunks to come up with some epithets about my palsy. A couple of weeks ago, at the bar of a pub on Chalk Farm Road, one of them answered the call.

He was well-spoken, floppy hair, trenchcoat, half-cut, exuding that innate belief in his own untouchability that tends to be the by-product of an expensive education. Why did he want to know, I asked, was he looking for a sore face himself?

He turned pale. I'm far from a physically intimidating presence. But I do find that, in this part of the world at least, a Scottish accent growled at the correct pitch suggests an adolescence spent running with razor gangs and negotiating the social hierarchies of borstal, rather than one passed largely in my bedroom reading the NME.

"No, no," he stammered. "I was worried about you. I thought you'd been punched or something."

I haven't been punched, I muttered, willing the barman to return to my half-filled Guinness glass.

Silence, and with it the implication that this is a dialogue in which I am not keen to engage.

"So then, if you don't mind me asking, what is wrong with your face?" 

I sighed. I don't mind people asking at all. Indeed, if I know someone beyond an entirely superficial level it seems unnatural if they don't broach the subject: it's literally staring right at them. I've talked to you lot about it plenty of times, after all, and am usually the first one in any company to start telling Elephant Man jokes. I do, however, prefer that when someone raises this, I have already established with them a more intimate relationship than, say, that of two complete strangers waiting at the same bar.

"If you're that desperate to know, it's was caused by a brain tumour," I told him. I  then gave a one-sentence tutorial on the function of facial nerves, said that I'd looked a lot worse, and that I hopefully would eventually look a lot better.

At this point he seemed to acknowledge that he had transgressed several social codes, and attempted to cover his tracks by dissembling. "Oh right, yeah, my father had a similar thing with his face," he blurted.

Really?

"Yeah, yeah, really. And I had a tumour as well. A tumour in my mouth. A mouth tumour. Although it wasn't as bad as yours, obviously."

I raised by one functioning eyebrow. The barman arrived with my pint. I took it wordlessly and returned to my table.

Amazingly, this was the first time anything like this has happened to me.