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?

As I type, it's my 38th Birthday. Nothing bitchenly amazing has happened, since I worked last night and am at work and slacking off whilst I type tonight, I just slept the day off round my Ma's.

She did though have an Amazon box for me;

….though the last one may be a curse as well as a blessing, given its low reputation amongst Who-maniacs. [They certainly aren't infallible though.]

I don't have a hang-up about years or numbers, so I roll my eyes at anyone going "who-ooo, a step closer to the big four-oh". Hey, if we're talking disasters predicted for 2012, neither my 40th birthday nor the end of the Mayan calendar will be anything near as calamitous as Boris Johnson's London Olympics.

I would, though, like to add my annual reflection of how my birthday proves that astrology is bollocks [as if any more proof were needed]; I was born on the same day, at [AFAIK] pretty much the same time, as the Formula 1 driver Rubens Barrichello -

- He's rich. He's famous. He's very talented in what he does. He travels the world, and is surrounded by 'beautiful'* women.

Whereas I… um….

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Weird Coincidence But Not Actually That Weird If You Think About The Probability, #21419:

Some time ago I added a friend from my town's little market, L., on FaceArse. She'd just joined up and was using it to get in touch with her old school mates [from a time several decades before I was at school] and have a few reunions.

One photo which came up in my news feed for some unknown reason grabbed my attention. I clicked on it to see the full version; there was L., alongside one of her old classmates. I peered closer, and clocked the tag underneath; "What the…"

When I next met L on the market on Saturday and talked to her about it, I confirmed what I thought. The woman was Mrs. B……….., and she had been my GCSE English teacher back in Romford over twenty years ago. Still teaching in a different part of East London, and although obviously there was a difference in what twenty-something years had done, still very much looking the same.

It's hard to describe the feelings this brought to me; a kind of mixture of "ooooh…" and "AAAAARGH!!!" – this period of my life was a highly turbulent and volatile one [yes, okay, and quite a lot of the time it was also a drunk and stoned one]. Learning about 'the Scottish play' was not high on my personal agenda then, let's say.

In fact, when I mentioned all the above to my mother today, she said; "Oh yes, Mrs B….., I remember her; at the last Parents' Evening before you left school, she was almost screaming with despair at how you just wouldn't write anything. I told her to get you to write about heavy metal, it was the only thing you were interested in."

I can well understand this. It can't have been easy dealing with the teenage me [gawd knows, I only managed it with chemical assistance] and my eagerness to get myself out of the education system as fast as possible.

Also, time [and therapy] has softened my anger which I had at anything to do with school, and I can see what she was trying to do, even if I didn't agree with the way she did it; and I can appreciate the frustration of her compulsorily having to push Shakespeare onto ungrateful teenagers. I'll even acknowledge the one brilliant thing she did, which was get me to read and understand Orwell's best works.

So once the initial AAAARGH!!! had calmed down, I thought, "well, I've got the link to her FaceArse profile, shall I drop her a message?" And I don't know about that.

Part of me wants to say "hello there, I know I was a right twat then, but I appreciate where you were and what you were doing now, so thank you"; and part of me thinks that's a shit idea, the past should be left as an unvisited foreign country, and although to her there may be the initial curiosity value of "how did he turn into that tranny weirdo social worker?" what else would it achieve?

Thoughts? Opinions? Ideas? You know what to do.

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* The F1 version of beautiful, anyway: an identikit tall, slender, blonde, white, holding a pole on the grid and appearing to have the brain of a lobotomised frog. I have other definitions.

Sometime on Friday night, the ice broke and I surfaced.

It's not predictable as such, but it's about twice a year that suddenly I find my mood dropping faster than a Gillette sponsorship of a prominent golfer*.

Last Tuesday lunchtime I was, as is my wont, on my little town's market sinking coffee and enjoying my friends there, happy as Larry** – and then, six hours later, I was panicky, shivering, wanting to vomit, paranoid, filled with obsessive catastrophic thinking, and generally utterly unable to look after myself.

This Saturday lunchtime found me back on the market and just about back to normal – well, not quite, but certainly running at 90% rather than about 0.0001%.

The causes, such as they are, are unknown, although there are factors; a bad meal and a bad sleep on Monday, a December lack of sunlight and encroachment of "Ve Haff Vays Of Making You Haff Fun" season, and – I'm told – I should have expected something of a "rebound" from the food poisoning of a couple of weeks ago, an aftershock as my system finally returns to normal, a lurch back to average following the slight high one gets from not being stuck on the bog all night.

Anyway. No serious damage done. And hopefully having the dip now means that I'll stay stable for the rest of the cold, dark season.

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An early Xmas present from the gorgeously-employed Max always helps;

The man with the most-misspelt name in British comedy [just ahead of David Bladdiebub***]

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The other event of the past week, slightly before I hit into my low, was that after months of wavering inbetween active participation and blatantly ignoring it, I finally closed my account on [websitebeginswithO].

The final straw, in this case, was being told I was both "fascist" and "communist" [surely some mishtake?] because I agree with our Government testing all cars here over a certain age to make sure they're not a deadly-dangerous high-speed bullet likely to run over your kid thereby saving several thousand lives per year.

The subject itself is stupid. But for some time now I've not wanted to post much on there because anything at all "controversial" [ie anything not pictures of fluffy bunnies] attracts the attention not only of my friends on there, but also of idiots, nutcases and Libertarians****.

Frog that shit. I'm not interested in what they say, and not interested in any site which allows them to say it at me in any way they like. If I wanted to spend my life arguing with Interwebz tosspots, I'd set up a climate change, evolution or multiculturalism blog.

Coincidentally, I'm told that the only open message boards / forums that don't suffer from Shitcock Syndrome are the ones that contain lots of links to free naughty photography and video materials. Presumably the visitors there are too distracted to spend time in crappy arguments…

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* I apologize for this reference, but it's the best one which came to mind right now.
** If anyone knows who Larry actually is, please send him my regards.
*** This is an ancient Mary Whitehouse Experience reference which nobody else will remember, but wtf.
**** I leave it as a reader exercise to decide how much the Venn diagram of these three groups overlaps.

today to Esther and FB, for the cards which arrived in the post this morning;

…thank you! It's always a delight to receive mail [or, to be accurate, it's always a delight to receive mail that isn't from Big Sodoff Electricity Company telling me exactly how many mortgages I should take out to pay this season's bill].

Unfortunately I'm behind on mailing things out to people – for instance Crow's book, several mix discs, large bundles of letters of love and admiration to Kirsty Wark – but I hope to clear my out-tray by the end of the week.

Clearing Kirsty the cat's out-tray is a different matter entirely…

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Geek Site of the Day [ganked from Dareva]: Strange Maps, collecting many examples where people have taken a different slant to cartography, for instance drawing the Netherlands if it had the population density of LA, or – as below – the northern hemisphere scaled not by miles but by travel times from London. [Glad it's not cultural distance from London, or we'd look so far north-east of the city we'd be somewhere near Uppsala.]

Maps, street-plans and atlases fascinated me as a kid – where other children's favourite books were Winnie The Pooh or Swallows and Amazons, mine was The 1978 AA Road Atlas of Great Britain. There also exists, still somewhere at the bottom of the pile of books in my little house, a volume of maps based on the UK 1961 census similar to those found on the above site – Britain as formed by the then population, religion, dialect, even diet.

Of course, as a London child, the still-revolutionary Tube map was a great fascination – and still is if you count the times I've used it here and elsewhere as site banners…

Plus: In my chemical days, in and around the very early nineties, I remember somewhere finding a street-map of Luton, blu-tacking it to the wall, and drawing on it plans for the military invasion of the town, or its obliteration by ballistic missiles.

In another world, I'd've been a cartographer: this, of course, now that the heyday of the Ordnance Survey's exclusivity to perfect accuracy is gone and inch-perfect satellite photography has covered the whole globe, means I'd now be severely out of work thanks to Google Maps, and probably relegated to drawing extensions to housing estates onto street-maps of Basildon, or designing confusing illustrations of huge shopping malls so that nobody can ever find the toilets. [I reckon we should all rise up in revolt against this, and wee down the escalators.]

This, alongside chemical engineer, brain surgeon, nuclear physicist and Ipswich Town footballer, is one of the great number of once-it-seemed-at-least-remotely-possible Fishes that never quite came to fruition for many reasons, some internal, some external.

In the theory of parallel universes – the idea that all consequences of decisions made do actually exist in their infinite number of separate time-spaces – there must be a range of existences in which Fish not only didn't start drinking heavily in his mid-teens, but also became a frequent attender at his local C-of-E church, attended University, married his first girlfriend Caroline, settled down in suburban Essex with two-point-four children and a mortgage the size of a small African country's GDP, and really likes golf.

Although if I ever met said Fish I'd have to murder him.

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Today's Big Question: What 'parallel universe' you would you want to kill if you ever met them?

Not a great deal to report. I missed yesterday's Greenpeace Fair, mainly because I had a migraine and didn't want to get out of bed [oh yeah, and the cricket was on too]; the only thing I've got coming up on my agenda is a lunch in London with a gorgeous person in ten days' time.

But with that and P.'s birthday this week, I did have to do some particular shopping the other day…

The only other thing I can think of from the past few days is that I've seem to get into a kick for scallions / spring onions.

[That's eating them, and nothing else, you filthy-minded peoples.]

[Though if you've any other ideas about what to do with them, then answers on a postcard...]

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Last Night's Dream: I know I suffered from headaches over the weekend, but why in this dream [also featuring a Heath-Robinson polystyrene-cup flinging machine] was I trying to use a paracetamol pill as lubricant?

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Facebook "Coming Out" Update. It's amazing – and a little educational – to learn how and why, just a little time after putting up a picture of my legs and boots as my primary FB pic, just how many friend requests I get from random men, mostly in south-eastern Europe and the Middle East.

It is rather delightful, though, to note that of the very few who I've clicked "yes" to when they didn't seem too pervy or had some other redeeming feature, many of those changed their mind quickly when they read the rest of the profile…

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Random Animal To Disguise The Fact That This Entry Isn't Actually Very Good:

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Today's Big Question: What's your favourite [or, if you haven't got a favourite, your least-detested] type of bird?

[NB: "Bird" is not to be used here in its colloquial Essex sense.]

Graffiti seen this morning on a roundabout on Woodbridge Road, Ipswich [artist's impression]:

Thanks, pal: all the logic centres of my brain have just exploded.

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I'd just been enjoying a cup of coffee in a greasy spoon cafe, on my way back from an appointment; my Indie-reading was somewhat interrupted by C., who I worked with some years ago.

She's a nice woman, except that she's obsessed with telling people what the Holy Spirit has done for her life. I gave her ten minutes before looking at my watch and telling her I had another meeting out of town I had to get to.

Slightly annoying, yes; but, in her case, far less annoying than what she was when I worked with her, which was severely bi-polar/manic-depressive, and prone to the most dramatic of mood swings. From what I can gather from her and others, in her case her "spiritual awakening" seems to have proved to be an anchor on which she's managed to cut out the worst of these events and, so she tells me, has enabled her to cut her medication down to levels where it's not giving her bad side-effects.

And that's fine. I'm happy she's found whatever means necessary to enable her to reach a better place. Each person must find their own path to wherever they're going.

I just don't want "chapter and verse" about it – in her case, literally – whilst I'm trying to get my brain back together at 10am after a work meeting…

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Social networking. About a week or ten days ago, I decided to link several aspects of my Interwebz life together, in that my FaceArse profile/pseudonym would contain "Damini", my tranny side.

This had been kinda subtly implied for some time, but I didn't want to be too brazen about it; my network on there contains not only wonderful Interwebz friends, but also quite a few real-life people from my little town and area.

I selectively [and quietly] culled a couple of people who I was a bit ambivalent about, then said "soddit"; Damini's photos went up on my profile.

I'm glad to say that the local feedback I've had has been very good. A few people have completely ignored it – that's absolutely fine, I'm not forcing anyone to acknowledge this side of me – whereas several others have been very positive about this.

I've explained to them, as I always do, that this is not an obsession of mine, but it is an aspect of myself which I present to the world as much as any other; I try to hide as little as possible, whilst being careful not to leave myself open to others' malice.

It doesn't mean that I'm going to swan around my little town in a purple ballgown and four-inch heels, nor that any of my local friends [or, come to that, anyone off the Web I happen to meet] will run the risk of being embarrassed if I were to turn up to the restaurant in latex and PVC. [Which I wouldn't. Unless it was a really exclusive special kind of restaurant.]

What it does mean is that I'm accepted for my whole person, including those aspects of myself which, in less civilized times and places*, I've hidden for risk of opprobrium [or worse].

I must here acknowledge the ongoing support and positivity shown by my Interwebz friends, old, new and lapsed-for-whatever-reason, over several years on this blog and its predecessor on Xangarse; and especially those who've become real-life friends. You've helped me accept "Damini" as an integrated part of my whole self, rather than "yep, she's that bit over there". Thank you all.

Have a nice piece of battenburg on me.

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* Romford, 1980s.