The Lovely Gabby

If you heard tortured screams of dread anguish during the night, I don’t want you to worry. It was only me.

A Romanian uprising took place late last night and the flames of have only recently died down. It all began when Gabby decided that she wanted to start posting things on my blog.

I was sitting watching ‘Oh Lucky Man’ on Sky Cinema, when an arm suddenly appeared under my nose. As you can probably imagine, my upper lip is not usually the place to find arms, so to say I was a little taken aback is something of an understatement. However, I was less surprised to find a hand attached to the arm and that’s when I recognised the half dozen rings decorating the fingers. It was Gabby’s hand and it was holding a piece of paper that looked suspiciously like the flyleaf from my new copy of Auden’s poems.

I swallowed the large sob that had somehow developed in my throat.

‘Chippy, read,’ she said, or, more accurately, demanded. ‘Chippy: read!’ is more like it, I suppose. The colon is so very Romanian.

So, I read aloud from the piece of paper with the emblem of Faber & Faber still visible at the bottom of the page.

‘Hiya lovelinks! My name’s Gabby and I’m Romanian songbird and I sing songs in a band with my gorgeous sister and we make gorgeous pop music for the people in London who sell our records until we get to number seven in the pop charts doing the hokey cokey for the lovely ladies and gentlemen of the UK of England…’

There was some more about recording contracts, double decker buses, animal mutilations, but I think you get the picture. The point is: I knew at once that I had to save you. I had to take a bullet for each person who comes by this blog and expects to read undiluted Welshman. Which I did without hesitation.

I suggested that she get her own blog. I told her that she should get her own website, where she could put audio clips of her singing. I told her that she could sell tshirts with her picture on. And then I told her that people come here for thong news and they might not even like the hokey cokey. That really wasn’t the wisest thing to say. My lips kissed ring but it certainly wasn’t papal. There was then a row, then tears, and then some brooding stand-off near the knife draw.

Eventually, around one o’clock, I thought the danger had passed so I went to bed, nursing my thick lip, and leaving Gabby sitting under the kitchen table and knocking back her potato moonshine.

The sound of snipping woke me around four in the morning.

It was Gabby sitting in the bedroom cupboard and cutting up my thongs with a large pair of paper shears. Naturally, I screamed. That’s probably the noise you heard if you live anywhere on the 53rd parallel. Gabby screamed back and threw the shears at me. Luckily, I ducked and they passed straight through the plasterboard wall.

She then threw a thong at me but I had already got to her before she could do any real damage. A dozen pairs of summer thongs were ruined but that’s really nothing to a man who owns thousands. I was more concerned with what she could have done and I’ve vowed to keep my collection under lock and key from now on.

This morning she was as bright as marmalade, fully of apologies, and blamed a bad brew of
spud shine. She also announced that she didn’t think she needed a website as her career’s already better than mine.

‘Keep your bloody blog, Chippy,’ she said with one of those wide honest warm hearted Romanian smiles. ‘You keep your bloody blog and I keep BBC Top of the Pops.’

I hadn’t the heart to tell her that they cancelled Top of the Pops six months ago and that it was widely rumoured that she was one of the reasons.

Everything was neatly wrapped up when the neighbour came around a delivered a pair of paper shears he said he’d found sticking in his kitchen door this morning. He’d noticed my name on them and wondered if they belonged to me. I explained the whole thing and I should imagine the smile he had as he walked away was not a little feeling of being blessed.

Which is also how I hope you feel on this fine March morning.

Thong on.