So watching a motorcyclist fly into a fence wasn't exactly the best start to a Goddess Tori day.

I'd just turned off the dual carriageway onto the little country road leading south towards town, and thought "hey, there's a lot of bikes around" [was there a rally?]. Slowing down for an upcoming uphill right-hand blind corner, I watched the blue-and-white Suzuki – and the blue-and-white-clad rider – appear from the corner, fly across the road, and into the wooden fence two metres off the other side of the road.

I immediately pulled over and called 999; the driver behind me had stopped and went to see what was going on. Miraculously, the biker had escaped with only superficial injuries: the wooden fence had cushioned his impact. If it had been a different material – or, say, had concrete posts…

Once it was established that the ambulance wasn't needed, and that whilst the bike may not have been driveable at least the rider was, I left – and it's at that point, after one is needed, when the adrenalin/shock kicks in. Aaaaaaa…

Given the amount of miles I've done and still do – professionally and otherwise – I've seen a few cases of people and metal flying across roads. Whichever Gods there may be grant that I continue to see them and not feel them…

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And so, after much delay on the east side of London, into town: I managed to get to our meeting point about 4:15, only to find Max was similarly delayed by railway smeg-ups on the west side. It was pushing 6 by the time we met.

Finding that the restaurant we'd originally set our sights on wasn't open yet, we ended up in Ask [ok Italian chain]. Not bad pizza, except that eating it with cutlery that's blunter than a Charlie Brooker column on football is a bit of a challenge.

And so to the theatre. The Apollo Victoria is the home of "Wicked!", the offshoot musical from The Wizard of Oz. Quite why Tori had got herself into the place remains a mystery, but seeing her in a 500-seat theatre rather than a 3,500-seat concert hall would be a bonus.

The support act sounded from the foyer like an identikit dreary bloke with a guitar, so we skipped it. Little merchandise – the T-shirts were all last year's "Sinful" stuff – so at least that temptation [and strain on wallet] was avoided.

photo from here

And so to the show. The Goddess herself in blue and gold – shhh, don't mention the Botox – by herself, in contrast to 2007.  Set list from undented:

• Bells For Her
• Precious Things
• Silent All These Years
• Dragon
• Northern Lad
• The Power of Orange Knickers
• Marianne
• Space Dog
• Beauty of Speed
• Virginia
• Rattlesnakes [Lloyd Cole]
• Yes, Anastasia
• Me and A Gun
• Garlands
• Hey Jupiter
• encore
• Desperado [The Eagles]
• Personal Jesus [Depeche Mode]
• Take To The Sky

Okay, so I did spend the first two songs just sobbing like a big girl. But, hey, c'mon, talk about a double whammy…

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I liked being in the presence. I loved hearing the music straight from. But, I'm afraid, I'm getting increasingly misanthropic amongst crowds of anybody – even fellow worshippers.

Like: you've paid somewhere around £40 a ticket for this, right? How about you try watching the show, rather than watching yourself film it on your bitchenly amazing iPhone? If you have to use a flash, can it actually be a "flash", and not a blinding searchlight as used in Escape From Colditz?

Like: can we actually hear the music, and not some arse whooping in my ear?

Like: shouting "I LOVE YOU, TORI!" is, at least in this context, a little redundant. Out of the 500 or so present, how many would have said that they don't?

I conclude that as much as I appreciate seeing "live" artistes, I'm getting too old for this shit. Paying top dollar and negotiating Central London, to sit amongst people I'm becoming increasingly misanthropic about [at least when they're a crowd], is getting less and less attractive. Nor are you getting me to "Billy Elliot" over the road. Even if it has got the woman from "Prisoner Cell Block H" in it.

I guess, though, sometimes on special occasions like this was…

Happy Birthday, Max*.

* [only a month late, but who's counting?]

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:

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?

Before I start today's entry: go and VOTE on Bethany's First Bra [and the other stories if you want] on my Literotica page. You don't need to login or give any details to give it five stars.

Also: FYI, the FAQ over to the right has been revamped.

Also also: what the smeg is going on with the non-existent fridge engineer???

[Landlord called just as I typed the last question mark on that sentence. Engineer out today hopefully.]

Also also also, but important: I have an interview Monday week. I'm not giving details yet because it's a pretty low-publicity project [though one quite germane to recent events further North].

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I had a lovely day yesterday out with the fantasticious Max wandering about bits of North London and eating fabulous [spinach/parmesan/egg¹] pizza in a place just off Hampstead Heath. It was a brilliant hot day – perhaps just a little too hot for doing all the walking – and it was the perfect way to leave everything behind for a while. Thank you, gorgeous.

Subjects discussed included: work and future possible work, the Sarah Waters book she got me as a birthday present, journalism, a "rock chick" [no, not in the Lita Ford sense, look it up if you dare], Net meetings, relationship drama, why this bit of North London is so steep [I think the clue is in the names Highgate and Muswell Hill...], gender/sexuality issues [duh, like we ever avoid them ], the de-feminization of women in the former Soviet empire, the recent Anne Lister biopic and why Maxine Peake is so squee, and why "a spoonful of Dairylea helps the medicine go down", as Julie Andrews didn't sing.

The Secret Diaries of Anne Lister²: Ms Peake wonderful but the film just pretty okay. It has established "Do you like Byron?" as a hot chat-up line though.

The only thing at all wrong with the day was having to cope with the usual London traffic on the way to and from. Note to self: I am not Doris Day, and trying to emulate her at full pelt in a traffic jam on the Euston Road will not only get me funny looks, but also mean my voice is reduced to a small croak this morning. Thanks, mp3 player set on random.

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1 Years ago, I took a client to lunch in Norwich to a fancy proper pizzeria; she'd only ever had Pizza Sodding Hut before. That time I also had the Fiorentina – which comes with an egg in the centre. This utterly amazed said woman so much she didn't stop going on about it for a bloody month…
2 There's a long blog post to be written about my immersion in and strong identification with "lesbian culture", though thankfully I've escaped owning any KD Lang albums….

"Does the paranormal exist? I've noticed there's a definite area of my kitchen that's several degrees colder than the rest of the room. …I called an exorcist, but he said it was just my fridge." [Paul Merton]

The overarching topic of the moment is the broken fridge. After a couple of, how shall I put this, hurried visitations to Mr. Khazi – neither prompted by any of the usual foods which irritate my irritables – I wondered whether there may have been other causes.

Putting two thermometers into the fridge [just in case one wasn't calibrated - what, me, paranoid?] and leaving them there for several hours produced a reading of 10C [50f], when it should be at most 5C [41f].

I turned the knob up to full. Still 10C.

I switched the fridge off, defrosted it fully [which produced a lot of this entry's title], cleaned all the gunk out from underneath, switched it back on, and waited 24 hours for it to get back to working temperature. Which turned out to be 10C.

The fridge is part of the supplied "fixtures" of the flat, so I phoned my landlord's representatives. They sent round Aaron, the local electrician. He took one look, said "yeah, it's buggered, cheaper to get a new one than fix the thermostat" then went away.

Unfortunately here the story has been interrupted by the three-day holiday weekend, so I'm spending it devoid of refrigerated food content. Cue tin cans of everything.

Add to that the problem that come Tuesday it's not just a case of them ordering a new fridge to be delivered to my doorstep – it's an "integrated" fridge, part of a fitted kitchen; it has to be hard-wired in by Aaron – I wouldn't be allowed to touch it even if I wanted to.

So it looks like it may be a few days before I'm able to have a cheese sandwich without having to throw away the 90% of it I won't use afterwards. Okay, with the shops in my little town, the cafe, and some good friends, this is not exactly a disaster – it's totally copeable. It's just a right royal pain in the 'arris, that's all.

Although less of a pain in the 'arris than eating food that's been kept slightly warm for several days.

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Advance notice/warning that there's a new naughty story to be released, which is just getting its second proofread, hopefully as I type. Watch this space.

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Other things running round my brain this Saturday night:

* Not watching the Eurovision Song Contest. When it used to be one crap singing contest a year, it was something special, worth both loving and taking the piss out of. Now we have six sodding thousand "talent contests" on telly, from X-Factor to Britain's Got Embarrassing to Dorothy to Who's The Best At Pretending To Be Bea Arthur On LSD [note: yes, I made that one up, but I've copyrighted it so no nicking the idea, Sky One]. Why celebrate the "bad" when the bad has become the norm?

* Dinner with someone bitchenly amazing, this Thursday. If the sodding fridge saga doesn't intervene.

* Is that really Nicola Bryant, the woman who was Peri [companion to Doctors Fifth and Sixth], fleetingly in the John Lewis advert? [Yes, I found after much frame-by-frame research.]

* On which note… CELERY SQUEE!!! [This is a reference to the latest Who episode, which I won't further explain so that I don't give away spoilers.]

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Today's Big Question: Which household device*, appliance or gadget would you least want to give up? Why?

* note: this does not include "personal entertainment devices in phallic forms".