It seems I'm in divine company. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, has been talking to Radio 4 about how he's deaf in one ear:

"I've got what I suppose could be described as a very, very mild minor disability in that I have a completely non-functioning left ear, it's there purely for decorative purposes. And what strikes me about getting used to living with that, which I've had since I was two years old, is, I suppose, the need to explain an invisible problem to people and to do that in a way that doesn't immediately put them at a disadvantage. Do you start a conversation at the dinner table by saying, 'Incidentally, I shan't be able to hear a word you're saying, I'm deaf in my left ear?' And where do you go from there? But I'm also aware of how it impacts on other things - the fact that in a strange way it helps me sleep better, because I only have to put one ear on the pillow, and that it also gives me a strain in my neck and shoulders if I'm turning round at an odd angle to listen to people on public occasions. So this very, very small experience is one that sends out tendrils in different directions. It makes me think about invisible disability - what is it that I don't see that's likely to be a problem; it makes me think about how something apparently very trivial and very local can actually affect the whole of your body without your quite realising it."

Regular readers of this blog will recall that I share His Grace's views about the advantages of single sided hearing loss in relation to having a kip. I don't find public speeches and dinner table conversations as difficult to follow as he evidently does. But since Dr Williams and I are deaf in different ears, prospective hosts should be careful never to seat me on his left-hand side if they want the conversation to flow freely.

(You can listen to the rest of the programme here.)

"It's like going for plastic surgery, and coming out looking like an even bigger freak than I did previously." Gonnae put that in your song, Alanis? I know it's not actually an example of irony, but then neither are all those other things in your popular sub-grunge ditty.

I did look a right state coming out of hospital yesterday, though. My face had swollen up so much that I resembled football hooligan "documentary" presenter and all-round ballbag Danny Dyer. A scar, with stitches still in place, ran down perpendicular to each ear, with a large plaster plastered at the bottom of both. The nurses had instructed me not to wash my hair to keep soap out of the incisions, and dried blood was still caked to my lobes. I had to reassure the taxi driver who picked me up that I hadn't suffered a serious kicking.

Back at my parents' house, I'm now recuperating. Not that my present condition involves much physical discomfort. My left calf - from where the surgeon had harvested a spare nerve for my face - sends occasional spasms of pins and needles down to my foot. Eating is made slightly more difficult by the numb, engorged face and the stitches on the inside of my top lip. And I can't wait to scrub my greasy locks, which I'm banned from doing until tomorrow. All things considered, though, it's no more of an endurance than a typical Glastonbury.

Anyway, the swelling should subside in a fortnight. I haven't had a chance to survey my new collection of scar tissue yet, as I have to keep the plasters on the facial incisions until tomorrow and a dressing on my leg until next week. I'll have to have my stitches unpicked - ouch - in seven days, but this doesn't bother me as I'm dead hard.

Oh, and the operation was apparently a success. Still woozy from anaesthetic, I managed to speak to the surgeon shortly after the procedure: all had gone well, he reassured me, and I can come back in six months or so for the second stage. At which point my face will balloon out again and I'll have another chunk gouged out of my leg.

I now feel quite sympathetic to the plight of fading LA starlets. Which isn't particularly ironic, as I didn't have a hostile opinion of them beforehand. But I'm sure that's plenty for Ms Morissette to work with.

So first thing this morning, my phone goes. Can I call the plastic surgeon’s secretary.  I call the plastic surgeon’s secretary. Someone has cancelled, she tells me, and I can take their slot. Do I want to come in for my first operation on Tuesday?

Well, I hadn't seen that one coming. The first thing that goes through my head is: “My work might not be too keen on this” (I hadn’t even warned them surgery was in the offing). The second is: “Yes, yes, indeed I do want to get this out of the way very much indeed.”

Assuming nothing would be happening until well into summer, I hadn’t made any sort of preparation whatsoever. So I’m thrown into a flurry of booking transport to Glasgow, warning my parents that I’m about to impose on them, and so on. Work can’t be nicer, it turns out, and of course I can take as much time off as I need. By mid-morning, my appointment with the scalpel is confirmed.

I’d take the time to reflect on this, and offer you my considered response. But I haven’t two minutes to myself all day. Never did I anticipate the brontosaurean NHS would compel me to act so swiftly. Remind me to ask the plastic surgeon if he can fit in a bit of liposuction while he’s at it.

The other week I went to see a plastic surgeon.

I don’t think I’m typical of the sort of person who goes to see plastic surgeons. I own neither a hairbrush nor a comb. I’ve never moisturised. When my clothes start to fall apart, I go shopping for new garments in the same manner that the SAS used to carry out shoot-to-kill operations in South Armagh - unsentimentally, at maximum velocity, and with scant regard for bystanders.

However. More than two years after the nerve controlling half my face was knackered by the removal of a rather large tumour, it has become apparent that my head is not about to become symmetrical of its own volition. I’ve tried waiting for the nerve to heal. I’ve tried stimulating it electronically. And while my right cheek droops slightly less than it did 18 months ago, it doesn’t look like springing into action any time soon.

I don’t cry myself to sleep about this state of affairs. But I would quite, you know, like to look vaguely normal again. And so last week I found myself embarking on a path trodden by the likes of Pete Burns, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jocelyn “The Bride of” Wildestein. I went to see a plastic surgeon.

I’d made the journey up from London expecting to have to fight my corner. Since my operation I’ve been consistently told that a conservative, wait-and-see approach is best. Moreover, a general perception of plastic surgery as something almost frivolous - which, compared to, say, the removal of a brain tumour, it is, at least in my case - led me to imagine that waiting times might be years long. There will be some people reading this, I am sure, who disapprove of the fact I might be entitled to such a procedure on the NHS.

But the consultant himself - an amiable man, probably in his mid-40s, as far removed from the stereotypical Hollywood hack surgeon as it is possible to imagine - disarmed me as soon as he sat down in his Glasgow office. I didn’t have to convince him that anything needed done. After two years it is very unlikely that the nerve will recover, he told me, and reanimating a palsied face is always difficult. But not impossible.

Here’s what he proposed. A spare nerve would be extracted from the back of my calf. This would be grafted to the functioning facial nerve on my left side and run under the surface of the skin, over my top lip, to the right hand side, as in figure six below:

It would take six to nine months before the transplanted nerve could transmit signals again. After this interval, he would open up the right (wonky) side of my face, take out the flaccid cheek muscle, and replace it with one taken from my inner thigh. I’d have to wait another three or four months before everything started working. And, the surgeon warned, “you won’t be able to move that cheek as much as you did before the operation. But there’s probably an 85% chance of giving you a decent smile.”

There were downsides, he added. The leg muscle is a slightly different shape from the cheek muscle, so my face wouldn’t be entirely even. And I’d be left with two facial scars: one on the left side, running vertically parallel to my ear at about sideburn level; and a second one on the right, again running down to the lobe, then darting over to the corner of my jaw, and continuing to about the middle of my neck. There were all sorts of steps that could be taken at the time of the incision to minimise the visibility of this, the surgeon said. I pictured a symmetrical, but bearded, version of myself, and calculated that it had to be an improvement. Alternatively, I could follow Michael Jackson’s example and blame it on a hereditary skin complaint.

“So then,” he concluded. “Do you need some time to think about this?” No, I didn’t. I'd heard enough.

The maximum time I can be kept waiting for the initial operation is 18 weeks. A quick spot of mental arithmetic told me I could be smiling again by the summer of 2009. There was a bounce in my step as I left the hospital and sauntered towards the Trongate.

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.

Once every few months, my job compells me to work a week of nightshifts. This I don't particularly mind; I get to wear civvies, stop shaving and see how fast my chair's wheels will carry me from one end of the empty office to the other. There is also very little that is more satisfying than riding the tube home at 6am, looking smugly at a carriage of commuters, and knowing that by the time they all clock in for the day's anomie and wage-slavery I will be in my bed.

However, that's where my problems begin. You see, I'd previously thought  that the road I live on was very quiet. It's in an unremarkable suburb of north London, and not much ever happens here; there are no bangin' warehouse raves or Libertines-style guerilla gigs or mass lynchings of suspected paedophiles by vigilante mobs. Instead there are a lot of young families, pensioners and cats. If any of them go in for serial killing or converging around massive reggae soundsystems their double glazing stops me from knowing about it.

By night, at least. I'd never been around to work this out before, but during daylight hours the place fills up with a cacophony of background noise. Dogs being taken for walks bark at each other. Toddlers shriek and yell as their harrassed mums let the loose in their gardens. Bin lorries beep-beep-beep their way up the road. My bedroom is at the rear of the house, which you would think would be quiter. And at night, it is. But I've only just found out that it backs onto a street full of mechanics' garages, clanking and whirring and vrooming during business hours enough to turn even Jeremy Clarkson into Swampy.

So I find myself trying to nod off just at the point where my neighbourhood comes alive. As my heavy eyelids fail to drop, I curse myself for failing to buy earplugs...

...And then remember that I don't need them. I  turn my good left ear to my pillow, leave the dead right one pointing unreceptively towards the din, and zonk out. Why did I ever think my tumour was in any way a bad thing?

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Being "corned beef" in only one ear, I think I should show solidarity with those who are bilaterally deaf. So I'm posting a link to a petition on the 10 Downing St website by started by a reader of this blog who wants all digital TV programmes to carry subtitles. I suggest you sign it if you're a UK subject as it's a good cause; more so than some of the other nonsense on the site, such as campaigns to replace the national anthem with 'Gold' by Spandau Ballet, honour the broadcaster James Whale with a Knighthood and allow the sale of elephants in pet shops (actually, I think I might put my name to that last one as well).

Some people only feel truly alive when they are singing, or dancing, or channelling their energies into creating great art. Me, I only achieve such self-realisation when I am participating in a pub quiz. In everyday life my disordered brain struggles to process routine information, like remembering that I need to pick up my keys before shutting the front door behind me. But ask it to answer random and entirely useless trivia questions - such as who was the first man to wear yellow trousers in the House of Commons, or how do crabs urinate, or which former West Ham goalie used to work for NASA* - and it clicks into gear like a well-oiled if slightly grey and mushy machine.

My year off meant I was able to devote more time than ever to harvesting nuggets of ephemera. Initially housebound for much of the day, I would flit around Wikipedia for hours stumbling upon precis of different breeds of owl, or Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, or the career or PJ Proby - anything that I could take on board within my two-minute attention span. The result of this was that my head became stuffed with all manner of nonsense that no amount of brainwashing will ever shift - such as where the world's largest ball of string is located, or what is the collective noun for a group of ravens, or who invented the hovercraft**.

None of this rubbish has any practical value whatsoever, but I returned from my break at least hoping to take the capital's pub quizzes by storm. Sadly, however, the triumph to which I am due has not yet materialised. This is because I cannot find one running anywhere near my house. I have moved into a trivia vacuum.

When I first came down south five years ago I was a regular at a music quiz run weekly at the Old Dairy in Finsbury Park. To prevent High Fidelity-style anoraks dominating proceedings, the master of ceremonies would always include a round on Rick Astley or Banarama. It was brilliant, but now I live across town and can't get there in time.

So I'm issuing a heartfelt plea: if anyone knows of a decent pub quiz in north west London, let me know. I'll come along and join your team and tell you (if you didn't know already) what phobia Napoleon suffered from, which is the only mammal that can't jump, and what bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windscreen wipers and laser printers all have in common***. Please. I've got to get all this drivel out there somehow.

* Benjamin Disraeli, through their eyes, Shaka Hislop

** Cawker City, Kansas (it has a circumference of 40 feet), a murder, Sir Christopher Cockerell

*** Fear of cats, the elephant, they were all invented by women