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…

=========================

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…

============================

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…

=================================

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.

=================================

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?

Various Updates, Thingies And Other Stuff:

- The new "Like" button which appears at the foot of this post should work, and you should help me test it out. [To me it appears to work on your logged-in Facebook ID, so if you don't want to disclose that don't click]. I'd also like to know what happens if you're not logged into Facearse, so experiment away.

- It's a wet three-day weekend here, and although I could be at a Street Fayre elsewhere in the county I really can't be arsed to get out of the door. Instead, it looks like the snooker on the telly and the DVD of The Machinist which Gosia has recommended and lent me. Review will follow [if it's worth it].

- Three days to Stick An X Next To A Twunt Day [see previous post], and it looks like a grudging LD vote, unless I decide to vote for the candidate with the biggest knockers.

- Why didn't someone tell me before how bitchenly amazing Inga Liljeström is?

- There's an application in so possible brilliant job news to come, but I'm keeping it under my hat at the minute just in case it doesn't pull off. Suffice to say that it's on a subject I've quite often blogged about [and which was especially highlighted on telly last week] and I'd be excited to be able to make a real difference in this area. Sorry for being cryptic, but until I know if I'm at least being interviewed…

- The new toaster is called Bernardo.

- Suggestions for other names for various household objects should be sent to the usual address. The current grand prize for those whose entries are selected stands at its standard level of a 30-second drawing of a man with a garden rake up his bum.

I've not been feeling very bloggy lately. So sue me.

Things that have happened since my last proper blog [none of them much interesting];

- My luck with chairs continues in the "omigod, why can't I just sit on a tortoise" vein, given that my computer chair has fallen to pieces. Which probably serves me right for picking one up in the bargain aisle at Staples.

Chair Wrongness [linked for very slight NSFWness]

- At the time I fell off it last Tuesday, the top button on my jeans went "ping" and flew off. This weekend I sewed a new one on. Donning them this morning, it lasted two hours before going "ping" in the dairy section of Sainsbury's supermarket. I finished my shopping with one hand holding my jeans up.

[Which reminds me of the time I went through customs at Ljubljana airport. Having placed my studded belt in the tray, I walked through the detector gate - and my trousers fell straight down, revealing my Pink Panther boxers.]

- Mwah to Ang for lending me the DVD of Rosemary's Baby, and for including the following in the package;

- A slightly advance copy of Goldfrapp's "Head First" has come into my hands; first listen was none too impressive, but I'm loath to damn it just yet…

- And I promise I'll get back to doing this properly…

Ooh, that's better.

I had an emo moment – well, morning and early afternoon – earlier today, but a few hours spent in bed with some appropriate depressing gothy bleak 80s miserableness seems to have done the trick of draining off the worst of it.

[yes, it's that damn badly-lipsticked bloke. If you've not got this album, but would like to try out its utterly divine despairness, give me a shout and...]

There's a difference with me between momentary emo-day-ness, which can be nicely solved by lying down with crap music, and actual depression, in which I can't abide any music at all. You'll know the difference, because with the former I moan a bit about feeling emo, and with the latter I don't talk at all.

Also: with the former, I get momentary fleeting ideations of "hey, a drink would be nice right now". Not the latter. Even if I wanted to – which I wouldn't, because in that mood nothing is thought of as "nice" – I could hardly get out of bed as far as the offie [liquor store].

———————————————————

Good Things:

The old printer, which died last month by having its cartridge carriage fall off as if it had electronic leprosy, is now in the back of Priscilla waiting to be "recycled"; luckily someone else had just got a new one and asked me if I had a good home for their redundant HP.

Priscilla, by the way, is thankfully not affected by the current "sticky pedal" nightmare – she's too old. Her MOT* reminder has just come through, though, so someone will have to get underneath her and have a good poke around. Lucky girl.

———————————————————-

Another Good Thing:

On Tuesday night, I had an epiphany. For the past few months, I've been drawn into weekly hospital-soap Holby City like a fly around a particularly delicious stool; I found myself rooting for some characters [often evil ones] and booing others.

Then, halfway through the episode the other night, suddenly it dawned on me. "hey, this is utter pish!"

I won't be going back to it.

Promise.

——————————————————————

And A Slightly Surprising Thing:

The people of my little town are, well, they're Suffolk. They're not known for their advanced intellectual abilities; yes, I know, that's a country bumpkin stereotype, but like almost all stereotypes, there unfortunately is a small grain of truth for some people behind what gets blown up into complete bollocks for everybody.

I'm thinking of one particular person of my friendship and acquaintanceage, who has arrived in Suffolk from Essex and whose outward personality and identity sometimes reflects the stereotypes of both regions.

So when, over coffee the other morning, she says "oh, I love Shakespeare", it doesn't quite fit…

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* Note for non-UKers: an obligatory annual roadworthiness check for older vehicles. Despite everyone's moans when the time comes around, it probably saves thousands of lives a year; and if you're the kind of stupid rabid libertarian who thinks this is unwarranted over-Government regulation, then get the fucking fuck off my website now. Seriously.