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.