10 Reasons I Cheered For Each Germany Goal:

1. I'm Scottish. That's how I identify my "ethnic heritage"; the fact I was born and brought up in Dagenham, a particularly insalubrious area on the edge of East London, is an unfortunate fact of geography I prefer to overlook in favour of cultural continuity.

2. Scottish does not equal British. English does not equal British. Given that Scotland and England have been officially politically united for around three centuries, and that for most of that time the Scots have had the impression – rightly or wrongly – that they've had the raw end of the deal, it's traditional in my cultural heritage to be dubious of England and things English.

Okay, political devolution may have, at least partially, settled the grievances, but the cultural rivalry remains. We do not support things English – we may support things British, and every time the media south of the border assume that we'll be backing England it only makes it worse.

Even in today's BBC commentary there was Mark Lawrenson; "Seventy million people will be on the edge of their seat." 70,000,000 is the [projected] population of the UK; 50 million was the figure he wanted. You'd think an ex-Republic of Ireland player would know better.

3. "We can win the World Cup!" Scotland are a fairly crap football team; we've not qualified for a major tournament for a couple of decades, and although there's been a few bright signs and a couple of talented players [most notably...], we're pretty much going to stay fairly crap. We're used to it. We only complain when they're utter crap rather than fairly crap.

England – here I'm talking about the media and a subsection of the fans – seem to somehow believe they have an inalienable right to be one of the top contenders, even though they haven't been for about as long as Scotland haven't. Every major tournament is accompanied with [I'm looking at you, Radio FiveLive, here] journalists sitting round in a studio asking "Can they win?", analyzing in great detail the possible failings of the England team, then somehow forgetting all that and answering "yes".

4. Overkill. Which is a brilliant Motorhead album, a brilliant NYC punk-thrash band, and just the word to use, following on from number three, as to the coverage England get. I heard that ten million people watched the Eng v Slovenia match the other week. Doesn't that leave forty million or so English people interested in something else? I like football, but I don't want to force it on anybody nor for it to dominate at the expense of everything else.

5. England fans. I know that the yob is a small minority, but the problem is that it's a very vocal minority. Staying out of pubs helps minimize the time I'm subjected to them, but they still exist. And despite the campaigns, there is an undeniable crossover between the hardcore England following and the extreme right.

During the 1996 tournament, when England met Germany in the semi-final, I had the misfortune to be "looking after" P., a very difficult – read racist, homophobic, misanthropic cnut – client. His language whilst we were watching was what mainly made me cheer the eventual German victory on penalties.

The England-Germany "rivalry" takes it to another level, with tedious World War II references every time the two teams meet. Again in 1996, in Ipswich several German exchange students had the shit kicked out of them by "patriotic" England fans, for – well, the reasons weren't clear, since they were a mish-mash of things that had happened when none of those present were born. FFS, grow up, fuckers.

6. Other Countries Exist Too. I'm a football fan. I want to hear what's going on in the World Cup – y'know, the other 31 teams – as well, rather than having six-page analyses every time Wayne Rooney farts. England's elimination from the tournament means that journalists will have to look a little wider for their stories. Maybe now we'll hear about how and why Uruguay are impressing the non-blinkered, how Ghana is carrying Africa's hopes, or – thanks, Guardian/Observer – how corrupt the whole FIFA setup is.

7. My Friends: Maxine is half-German, and Birgit is full-on-German. They're lovely.

8. Contrariness. Something in me wants to go against the flow. I'm never comfortable in large groups – metaphorical and real – and mass movements scare the fuck out of me, from Diana Grief Syndrome to the more recent Hate Gordon Brown Syndrome, even though I'd no great dislike for Diana nor any great regard for Mr Brown.

Robert M. Pirsig, in the [even better] sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, "Lila", reports an American Indian tribe in which those who had thought they had suffered a wrong became contrarians, and started doing everything backwards as a sign of protest and "otherness" until it was settled.

I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I certainly recognize the urge. I wanted to laugh on the day of Diana's funeral, but didn't dare. I might have voted Labour last month, just because everyone said they'd lose, if they weren't so crap on certain things. And when people assume that I think a certain way – whether they think I'm a lefty or a righty, whether they think I'm gay or straight, whether they think I'm English or whatever – I want to say exactly the opposite just to shut them the fuck up.

9. David Cameron was "backing England", and flew the flag from 10 Downing Street. Okay, this one's childish, I freely admit. But if that smug cnut came out of the house one morning and said that murdering baby seals with chainsaws was a bad thing to do, something in me would go "hmmm, maybe there is another side to it…"

10. Germany were by far the better team. In the final analysis, that's what it boils down to. Defensively they were wobbly, but going forward they rocked in entirely the way which England didn't.

I have my own theories as to why England never managed any sort of a performance in their four matches – mostly in terms of successive managers picking the best players rather than the best team – but, hey, I'm not the manager. Yes, I'd like his pay packet, but with the media in the frenzy it is, no way would I take the job for all the money in the world…

Last night's biopic of John Lennon in his most turbulent period, "Lennon Naked", was an absorbing and productive watch.

From roughly when the Beatles started getting all drugs-and-Maharashi to when he left England for good in 1971, it showed an angry man, a flippant man, as well as a problematic and vulnerable man.

Two things stood out in the production; the first was the brilliance of Christopher Eccleston in the lead, and the "often-mentioned-in-this-blog in a "squee" manner when she was in Torchwood" Naoko Mori as Yoko.

Although when these two actors reprised John and Yoko's famous naked photographs, part of me was going "woooooot!" at Ms Mori, and the other part was going "…hey, am I really looking at the Ninth Doctor's knob?"

[It's lucky I'm not with Butterfly any more. Given her ecstatic - almost orgasmic - reaction at seeing Mr Eccleston's botty in Elizabeth, I can hardly imagine what the sight of his frontal banana would have done to her...]

The second, more serious, issue which the programme certainly didn't shy away from showing was the casual racism which Yoko Ono has always had to deal with from the English psyche.

Yoko's never been "liked" by the media here – not for her art, not for her choice of husband, and certainly not for her defence of what she regards as the legacy of Lennon since his murder. I don't want to go into whether she's right or wrong in what she's done, especially in the past thirty years; just to say that even at the time, at a young age, I picked up the strong impression that racism played an unspoken part in the very strong criticism of her.

It wasn't that she was a woman who was uppity, brittle and screamed a lot; it was that she was uppity, brittle and screamed a lot contrary to English expectations of [East] Asian* women. But – even worse than that – it was that she'd somehow usurped an English "icon" into her clutches, using a [very East Asian, apparently] low cunning.

I've noticed this in a few other things. I noticed it back in 1988 when I went out with a Cantonese-origin woman for a short time; I attracted low-level racist abuse from some acquaintances – though they never actually said anything in her presence; I got the abuse for "choosing" her.

I notice it still on the couple of occasions when someone's clocked a couple who's white man/Asian woman, and said once they're out of earshot "I wonder where he ordered her from?" This from people who would certainly shy away from direct racist abuse, but who see nothing wrong in the facepalm-inducing stereotyping they've just bought into.

It seems to me that they have little problem with people of non-white origin when they're "over there", hanging out with each other, but once they start mingling with the decent white folks and infecting our gene pool [or something], then, well…. It's a form of "soft" racism that still has an underbelly in Western culture. As late as 2009 we've still got interracial marriage being refused…

On the other hand: at least, though, the direct racist abuse John and Yoko suffered is much less prominent than it was in those days, certainly much, much less fashionable except amongst the noticeably stupider and badly misspelt end of Facebook groups. We've come a long way since 1971, and programmes like this do a great service in reminding us that "the good old days" were in many, many ways very bad…

Poor Yoko. She's helped change the world for the better, but not necessarily in the way she thought she might….

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* Usage note: "Asian" in the UK primarily refers to people of Indian sub-continent origin, rather than to people from the Pacific rim.

This posted is entitled "Things People Expect Me To Like But Which I Actually Don't, But Please Don't Hate Me For Any Of The Below."

1. Bikes. People look at the riah, the occasional bit of leather, and some of my music collection, and put two and two together to make me a motorbike enthusiast.

And, yes, I like the look of bikes, and to some extent the look of bikers. What I'd never actually do is ride one.

This can mainly be traced to the fact that my one experience on motorized-two-wheels, aged sixteen on Bill's 50cc round the Romford ring road, ended with a, shall we say, altercation between myself and Mr. Twunt In A Volvo on a roundabout. It was at that point that I vowed that should I ever meet a Volvo driver again, I'd do so only with an iron cage around me, thanksverymuch.

2. Tattoos. For much the very same reason as #1 – it's supposed to go with that heavy metal part of my image. Well – maybe this was more of the case twenty years ago, when it was more associated with rebellion of whatever sorts. They've become much more mainstream since, and are now about as rebellious as Dairylea.

"Tattoos are stupid people's way of telling you they're stupid without them even having to open their mouths" – Victor Lewis-Smith

But my main beef is with their permanence. Temp ones are fine – but scarring your whole body for life when the way of the world is that everything changes seems to me particularly…

Artist's impression of what most tattoos look like.

To ram home the point by taking it to its logical extreme; I wonder if anyone who thirty years ago was mad on Gary Glitter is still glad they had the tattoo to say so?

3. Bob Dylan. Given that my mp3 collection starts in the sixties and includes some of the wave of the revolutionary music which came at the time, plus how to the upmarket media the man is a God and can do nothing wrong, a lot of people think I'm a fan. I'm not. He wrote one amazing song ["Blowin' In The Wind"], one good pop song ["Mr. Tambourine Man"], and spent the rest of the past forty years nasally whining to no good purpose.

3a. Whilst we're on the subject of that era of music: The Velvet Underground provided a shitty excuse for a thousand crap 80s-indie bands to just think "clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang-clang" was a decent guitar riff, and by the way "Venus In Furs" is just a bunch of unconnected cliches – give me "Penguin In Bondage" any day.

3b. Also loved by the media set, but not by me: Joanna Newsom is just a woman wittering randomly with a harp. It's not even good random wittering in a Björkian or GoddessTori-like manner.

4. Twitter. [I recently bit the bullet and signed up. It's not that I'll post there, but I'm following others - if you use it, let me know so I can follow you. And anyway, the gorgeous Miranda Hart's on it. Squee.]

I like the idea of a 140-character limit for such micro-blogging; it encourages concision. But please, if your message is more than that, use another medium. This applies particularly to those who are writing more of a blog post than a tweet, meaning I get twentyish tweets from them in thirty seconds, which are actually shown in the wrong order and is just a pain in the bum to read.

To them I say: WordPress.com is free, reliable and you can link to your bonzerly amazing blog post in just 20 characters using a redirection service. [Which I'm about to do when I finish this.]

5. Slap. Despite my tranny tendencies, I actually never wear make-up, with the exception of a bit of toenail polish sometimes. This is partly because I don't like the look of it even on women let alone myself, partly because even when I did try applying it I ended up looking like a sociopathic Armenian clown, and partly because you smell and look like you've rolled in and out of a chemical factory. Overapplication, in the air stewardess or clown sense, actually makes me feel physically nauseous.

[picture removed because I wanted to be sick]

5a. Similarly: one of my jobs in my youth was electroplating, in which I handled a lot of dangerous chemicals [luckily I wasn't depressed at the time, given the amount of cyanide that I had to lug from lorry to plating plant]. Your clean scent is a good thing, and hiding your personal odour may or may not be necessary; but if your expensive perfume reminds me of nothing more than tipping 2,000 hinges into a pan and pouring vitreous fluids over them and leaving them to cook for a couple of hours, it's not a good thing.

6. Blog posts which do nothing but sodding complain.

What? ….Oh.

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Today's Big Question: What do people think you should like but you actually secretly want to screw up into a ball and throw into an incinerator?

Dear Volvo Driver On A12: You might want to know that on a two-lane roundabout with dual-carriageway entrances and exits, keeping to your lane and not just driving across the fecking thing as if it wasn't there is a good way to keep the side of your car unblemished by Priscilla's front end [as well as to stop your nose being broken afterwards]. Thank you.

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Marigolds Season. Again that time of year has come around where the house needs a good thorough going-through [but don't we all? ] for when the landlord comes to visit in a bit under three weeks' time.

This time, I've got the big guns coming in. Three women I know who work as cleaners at my town's high school will be doing the job for me [for a fee, natch]; the idea being that if they can cope with the mess and detritus left by delinquent teenagers, they can cope with anything I can throw at them.

Even [and yes, I've checked this first] if they happen to find any, ahem, nefarious items whilst they're doing it…

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Thirty-Eight. For those who don't know, Sunday is my birthday. No, this isn't a plea for you to rush out and post me cards, presents and expensive lingerie*; it'll be a normal Sunday in that I'm working the night before and will be snoozing on the sofa for most of it.

But I do want to say thank you to the gorgeous Esther for the birthday postcard;

….which is apparently a 1m-tall sculpture by this artist which she thinks is an asparagus monkey and I think is an asparagus torso. Although in this photograph I can't quite make out the "bits" at the bottom, so I'd have to go and examine it up close in whatever art gallery it happens to reside in.

It's been far too long since I went to an art gallery. There's nothing of any value round here, it being "sell pretty pictures of Suffolk landscape in Constable pastiche style to urban tourists" country, but there is one outstanding piece of artwork in the area;

Maggi Hambling's "The Scallop", on nearby Aldeburgh beach, which stands as a tribute to the composer Benjamin Britten. Of course, this being Suffolk, when it was put up seven years ago there were complaints. And it's had paint thrown at it a few times.

Some years ago, I was helping out a friend by working in an art materials shop some way further inland. I remember one day serving a woman customer who seemed absolutely fearsome, as if she had an aura six miles wide, who made me want to hide behind the counter. It's good to know I've met the Scallop's sculptor in real life .

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* unless you really, really want to, in which case I definitely ain't saying no.

Yet more in the occasional series of "letters dictated but not sent" [sometimes because the court order precludes any form of contact].

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Dear U.S. Television, Specifically In This Case Showtime.

I'll admit, I've not been your biggest fan over the years. It used to be customary for anyone brought up in the UK to scoff at most of the output of other countries' commercial offerings – mostly with good reason, though with some very notable and celebrated exceptions.

Given the state of some of our broadcasting now, we're not in any position to scoff any more, of course, and although lots of things arrive on these shores that should have been strangled at birth [Everyone Turns Over From Raymond is the first one that comes to mind right now], and thanks to the Interwebz we can preview some things before they get here and hope they never do [The Prisoner remake, which we should resist at the border like rabies], when something worthy wings its way over it should be praised.

Top of my list right now is Nurse Jackie, which the BBC has been promoting with the first five episodes every night this week.

[All 3 episodes so far available in the UK here]

Although there's echoes of House – and every emergency-room drama-soap for the past thirty years – there's a unique, subtle vein of black humour that anyone who's ever worked in healthcare will recognize and enjoy.

The eponymous character is certainly no advert for nursing, with drug addiction, family breakdown, ethical violations and general bad behaviour as themes – and there's an annoying English upper-class "Sloane" doctor character which would make anyone here roll their eyes – but there's also an underlying humanity which shines through.

It's not an easy watch, it's not something you can watch without paying attention, but – at least so far – it has its rewards. Well done Showtime, and well done Beeb for picking it up and actually putting some promo weight behind it.

Yours noninvasively,

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Dear Facearse Denizens,

Please, do us all a favour: before you join a Facebook group, take a look inside – specifically at the "wall"  – and check if you'll be associating yourself with utter morons if you click "join".

Yours eyeboggingly,

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Dear British Theatre,

Yeah, I know, it's a tough time for everybody in this recession. It's difficult to get bums on seats when money's tight for punters – the normal fare of worthy, arty, cultural plays acted to an audience of three [including the director's mother's dog] has to be modified a bit to keep business ticking over.

So I can't entirely blame you when you resort to populist, headline-grabbing moves such as the previously-non-acting Charlie Dimmock to star naked in "Calendar Girls".

But nor can I blame myself for immediately ringing up enquiring if there's a discount for a season ticket.

Yours bonzerbegoniasly,

A week of two halves. First up it was recovery week, with the cold mentioned in last Sunday's post breaking out into that kind of "bad enough to stay home, not quite bad enough to completely wallow" middle-ground; so I got through a lot of media instead, including Spider, Stiff, The Mitchell & Webb Sound Series 1-3, Dr Strangelove, Sorry I've Got No Head, and far too much early-hours and daytime TV whilst my sleep pattern has coalesced around emptying my nose.

Me Too! – "Balamory" without any of the redeeming features.

"Stiff: The Curious Lives Of Human Cadavers" has been the best of the above, an eye-opening look into the alternatives to burial for the body, especially in what happens when they're "donated to science".

Despite any paranoia that one could end up on the dining table of a medical student with a low tolerance for alcohol and a high curiosity into sexual experimentation, or that bits of you will be left on the number 66 bus on the last day of semester, it's actually a pretty low chance that you'll be used by budding doctors. Other alternatives, for example being used in car-crash safety research or new surgery practice are available too.

There's also chapters exploring alternatives to the two "normal" disposal routes; composting and, well, "rendering", though in a non-invasive and a non-toxin-releasing way. There's also some lovely side-issues addressed drolly in footnotes: an account of a sheep necropsy is footnoted [paraphrase] "it's a necropsy because technically humans can only perform an autopsy on other humans. To get a sheep autopsy, it'd have to be a very different world – one in which a sheep was cutting another open."

Perhaps the best feature of the book was that it made me want to leave my body for "further use". My instructions to my family so far have been for organ donation followed by cremation, but if my body can be of benefit to people, I'm all for that.

You'll still all have to sit through the Undertaker Sketch at the memorial service though…

"Fred! Get some parsnips!"

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The last two days, feeling better but not at work, I've spent sitting in my little town's supermarket selling prize draw tickets: a little local girl is in Great Ormond Street hospital with a kidney tumour, and a few people have got together to raise money so the parents can survive and go back and forth whilst the treatment happens. I reckon we got through about five hundred tickets at a pound each.

Part of the success is that I'm lucky enough to live in a fairly well-off area – the supermarket's catchment area covers quite a sweep of rural Suffolk including some very "desirable" areas – and partly that the localness, the immediacy of the cause insantly resounds with people in a way that overseas causes maybe sometimes don't.

I think also, in these days of "third sector" corporate monoliths, there's still some advantage that the "charity" is three local mums in their kitchen rather than a "brand", with a whole raft of sales executives and middle management to pay off before the 'cause' sees a penny of benefit. [Yes, I mean you, MajorIllnessCharity Which May Or May Not Involve The Initials C.R. Which Butterfly Used To Work For Before They Chucked Her Out For Not Pushing Volunteers Hard Enough On Sales Targets.]

What's been interesting, in a socio-anthropological way, is the reaction of people to me and S. sitting in the foyer; how many of them are immediately interested in us even before they know we're fundraising, how many people utterly refuse eye contact and stride past as if they're in a speed-walking race, and how many people feel compelled to give an excuse ["I've got no money", said the ageing executive in the suit on his way in, only to be spotted coming out again with a bagful of Special Brew].

And of course that makes me realize how much I've done this myself, like telling Big Issue sellers I've already got this week's and how I "select" which ones to be a customer of by my own personal criteria [some of which are completely illogical and unsophisticated, as the cute Roma girl seller in [nearbymiddleclasstown] could tell you].

Or, as I put it to S. – "all these housewives coming in during the daytime – you need a bit of eye candy like me to sell tickets"

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Today's Big Questions [select either or both, depending on which you want to answer]:

- What "method" do you want for your funeral? Why? Have you chosen anything special for a service or memorial?

- What charity or cause do you support? What makes you give or withhold from people collecting for charity or selling The Big Issue? What illogical undefensible criteria do you have?