It's just over a week to the latest Audience With The Goddess Tori, and already I'm in "squee" mode to quite some degree;

…except that at £45 each inc. booking fee for two tickets, plus travel, plus subsistence, plus the inevitable "ooo! I must have that T-shirt!", means that it's taken all my hot shoe money for July…

[Not that the puncture, which threw up the need for two back tyres, followed two days later by the entirely separate puncture on the same wheel, which thankfully was repairable, did much for my immediate cash-flow situation either.]

So Fish @ the Junction won't happen, the mental health space conference won't happen, there's no new books [so I'm re-reading Kafka, just to add to my soundness and peace of mind], there's no new DVDs, and even the weirdo Greek film showing in Ipswich went in the out-tray marked "tits-up".

I'm not hurting for dosh as such – which makes me better off than 91% of the citizens of this country – just, well, don't expect me to take any long holidays in Kerala in the near future.

Although I may – after next Sunday – consider a one-way ticket…

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We of course live in interesting times for money, and as someone whose job relies on public funding through the County Council, my long-term future is blurry and uncertain. Not just of my "high-care" residential bloc, but of just about everything in the whole damn field.

Mental health is a prime area for cuts because there's always traditionally been a reluctance of the patients/clients to complain about anything – which for many years had a very sound reasoning behind it, in that people who complained were deemed either as troublemakers and thrown out of the system, or it was deemed that the complaints were part of their "condition" so required further/harsher treatment.

The people requiring "high-care", though, have recently got cut less; the experience post-"Care In The Community" in the 1980s meant it was recognized that cutbacks on services for them would mean the people concerned would take up a lot more resources in other services – police, A&E and ambulance, council officials – and generally be a pain in the bum to everybody. [Some of course went a lot further than that and, sadly, hurt or killed people because they didn't get the care they needed.] Whether that same recognition applies now we won't know for some time yet.

Again, whilst I'm not obsessing about this topic right now, neither am I taking out any 40-year mortgages.

I am not an economist, so I have no idea whether the "lack of consumer confidence" caused by upcoming cuts is worse than not doing the cuts, but I suspect…

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Okay, enough moaning. Have a zebraffe, courtesy of the b3ta giraffe image challenge:

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?

I must apologize for my radio silence; a few times I've clicked "New Post" to blog here, found myself not only grouchy but far too grouchy even by the standards I've set myself on this site over the years, and decided in the interests of propriety that the one thing the  Interwebz doesn't need is even more strongly-worded grouchy invective – even if I hope mine would at least be gramatically above Speak You're Branes level.

The upshot, it seems, will be that to save my job I will accept a 20% reduction in both hours and salary, though this is not finalized yet.

Of course this will have ramifications upon my lifestyle – it's certainly not undo-able, but it will mean some modifications. It's not as if I'll be on starvation level, so there's no need to worry here; just that "lifestyle change" is something I know I have a blobfish-on-a-seesaw-type inertia with.

Change generally is not something I look forward to – I'm fine with it actually happening, I'm just crap at anticipating it, with a huge propensity to pessimism that even Charlie Brooker might regard as slightly deviant and self-defeating.

So again I'll apologize for grouching and if, in whatever medium, I'm not as entertaining, communicating or as verbose as I should be. This too will pass.

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In the meantime, to give you something else to do, may I direct you to this link, in which you can waste an hour and a bit of your time watching the "classic" Santa Claus Conquers The Martians?

You're welcome.

I'm typing whilst listening to a soundscape incorporating Rimbaud's 1873 poem "A Season In Hell".

…who'd'a thunk some French bloke 136 years ago would so accurately predict and summarize being an Ipswich Town fan in the Roy 'Up Yer Bollocks' Keane era?

Anyway…

…yes, I know, I'm a bad blogging person, and a bad commenting person at the moment. Having cleared the latest instalment of "oh frog, the landlord's coming round, better clear away any nefarious goods" last Monday, my body has been succumbing to the cold that has threatened to take me down for some weeks, swelling my sinuses to the size of sewers and making my throat feel like I've been drinking a cocktail of Pernod and battery acid. [Sadly not available in your local Threshers'.]

The blustery weather's not helping either – today's mini-tornado luckily was in a village four miles down the road rather than down the main street; if I'd known I'd've got out my Dorothy shoes – and everything now seems on that downward slide towards Agh Festive Season in five and a bit weeks' time.

You can add to that my body clock's maddening habit of 5:30am starts on nights off – I've already seen more 6am episodes of Me Too! than is recommended under European Union health guidelines this month – and an increasing realization that I am coffee's crack-bitch and this needs to change.

No doubt this is a temporary lull rather than a wintry trough, but motivation's difficult to come by.

All I can do is apologize and say "normal service will be resumed", then it's back to the old motto: if you can't make 'em laugh, give 'em something fluffy to go "aaaaaaaah" at…

I hope you're all happy with that.

Thursday. The time of year for Priscilla to go and have someone slide under her and fiddle about [lucky thing]. Which kind of meant that I was stuck in Ipswich all day with nothing to do; I was going to help F. on the market again, but she's decided – and I think it's the right decision – that Ipswich is not her "target audience" and her energies will be better appreciated elsewhere.

So, once I'd filled up with coffee and finished the Indie crossword, I had about four hours to kill.

There's only so many shoes one can stare at for so long before one starts getting funny looks, and only so much time one can spend in the library before the staff think you're a hobo, so by about lunchtime I went for a long walk around the waterfront developments.

The part of the marina that's been done is, yes, very nice, except that they've completely taken out any public seating. My guess is that this is a deliberate decision to keep out the "oiks" – to sit and admire the view one has to buy something from one of the four or so little bistros, specialist food shops and expensive kitchenware emporia that look like they've just opened. At £1.90 for a cup of coffee they were, deservedly, virtually empty even at lunchtime, whilst the greasy cafe a hundred yards away was doing a roaring trade.

Apart from the overpriced apartments, the two focal point buildings are the University and the new headquarters for DanceEast.

The Uni is a striking building, but it doesn't interest me. Ipswich is not an academic town and all previous attempts to make it so have fallen on their respective arses – you can call it a University, I guess, in the same way that you can call my house a mansion; but it doesn't make it any bigger.

I can't say that dance has ever engaged me either – certainly in "popular" dance for reasons I've outlined earlier, and in "art" dance because I've never given it enough time or attention to understand its form, outside of the Firebird ballet.

I'm glad art/modern dance exists, in that I'm glad a proctology ward exists in Ipswich Hospital – but I don't plan to ever spend any time there in the forty or so years left in this life.

Obviously it needs a certain amount of organization to distribute the grants and correlate whatever "dance action" is going on north and east of London. But does it really need the whole of what in Ipswich terms is a skyscraper? Did it need £9million spent on it?

Decrying state spending on the arts is a frequent bugbear of right-wing gits. Obviously I don't share their penny-pinching myopia, since my experience tells me that there's more to life than the balance sheet…

[...whilst we're talking stupid gits - also see: Rupert Murdoch's son moaning because our mixed-economy broadcasting system makes it difficult for his corporation to utterly dominate our airwaves and spread right-wing bollocks. Boo fucking hoo; go call a waaaaamublance....]

…but in a town with significant social problems [and services for them faced with large cuts], a low-cost housing shortage, creaking transport links [A12 and main railway lines overburdened in their current state], etc etc, one does necessarily question whether it's the best use of public monies.

The whole waterfront development overall looks like it's geared towards getting Ipswich a mini-version of trickledown – if "we" attract a certain amount of rather rich people into town, a certain part of their cash will come down to the general populace. It didn't work in the Eighties, and it won't work now.

And when it doesn't, I'll be sure to compose a modern dance piece to express the sentiment "I Frogging Told You So".

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Friday: Was supposed to be at the premiere of Behind The Moon: Making "An American Werewolf In London".

A week ago I was emailed by the person who said they were getting the tickets, although told that I'd have to be kept updated as to getting to the event.

And nothing since then.

Last night I found that said person has gone off to Korwich for the weekend to see *person from other social networking site that I no longer post on but still read occasionally*.

Which is fine. Plans change, people change. A little communication, though, would help, n'est-ce-pas?

Still. The DVD of AAWIL is still fantastic, and it's probably better that Jenny Agutter stays in my head as she was in that film, and not twenty-eight years older…

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Saturday. Nothing on the telly, little on the radio, Ipswich 1 – 1 Preston…

Frog it. Time to pile up the Kate Bush CDs…

This post carries the subtitle; "Things that I would have blogged about in the past day or two had I been in the mood to blog about anything at all, instead of just laying in bed feeling sorry for myself with far too many packets of Jaffa Cakes".

1. Xena Project.

Sometime else. Maybe.

2. We Are Klang – Why Is It So Pants?

Containing the phrases "not funny", "embarrassing piss-poor attempt at audience participation", "if I were Rik Mayall I'd sue", "one of them is so nondescript that even the word 'nondescript' is in itself far too interesting a word to use about him" and "okay, the 'mystery cupboard' running joke is quite amusing."

3. Why, Despite Having That Psychotic Git In Charge, I'm Still Following Ipswich Town

"Stick it up yer bollox".

Oh dear.

4. The Most Disabled People Threatened By Proposed Welfare Cuts.

Far, far too angry to be coherent here.

5. The "Reverse Burglar" Concept Dream

Not in a Father Xmas way, where you break in and leave people things they want, but in a way where you break in and leave people things they don't want but there seems to be a surfeit of; waste paper, bogies, half-bags of salad left in the fridge, Katie Price books, old curtains, economic forecasts, Dr. Pepper, carbon monoxide.

Of all the above, bogies is almost certainly the least disgusting.

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Today's Big Question: Since this is a blog I can't be bothered to blog about, leave me a comment you wouldn't have bothered to comment.