Knife Games and Flaming Kittens

The reporter from The Times didn’t seem to understand my point.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I told the woman who sat poised over her notebook like some vulture with a ball point, ‘but it’s got nothing to do with stripping.’

‘Hasn’t it?’ she asked. ‘But the title…’

‘The title was a joke. You know… A funny acronym. T.E.S.T.I.C.L.E… It’s crude yet witty.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Are acronyms witty? I think our readers might disagree.’

‘Not in this case!’ I snapped and quickly sank my teeth into my knuckles before I could do some real verbal damage. ‘Look. It’s simple. You need to just go and ask Mr. Appleyard about his problem with Blogger. He’ll tell you all you need to know and then you can keep me out of it.’

‘But didn’t you say you’d be protesting? You said there would be clowns burning kittens. My editor only told me to come here because of the kittens.’

‘Yes, well, the kittens are out,’ I said sourly. ‘I had emails from animals rights activists. We had a frank exchange of opinions.’ Actually, they had also taken grave offense at my remarks about monkeys and beagles, though to be fair to them, they had a point about a man juggling live kittens doused in petrol. Promises I'd made to Internet Ronin about flaming fur had probably been a novelty too far.

‘I see,’ said the reporter, noting something down in shorthand.

I felt uncomfortable. The interview wasn’t going at all well, and I felt a bit relieved when Gabby came in with a tray. My heart skipped a beat when I noticed that a bottle of potato gin and a bread knife were alongside the plate of custard creams, the cup of tea, and my own freshly brewed coffee.

‘Are we happy?’ smiled Gabby.

‘We soon will be,’ I muttered, looking at the bottle of gin.

‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said the reporter. ‘You make you own wine.’

Gabby beamed. I frowned. The reporter looked puzzled.

Half an hour later, I was still frowning only I was now speaking on the telephone.

‘She’s out on the ledge,’ I said.

‘But is it a matter of life or death, sir?’ asked the emergency services operator. ‘If not, then you shouldn’t be calling 999.’

‘Somebody might die,’ I promised him. ‘I have a reporter from a national newspaper standing seventy feet above a courtyard and threatening to jump when a story still needs writing about the technical difficulties plaguing one of the country’s top blogs.’

‘I still don’t see what that has to do with the fire brigade,’ said the man. ‘What’s your blog called?’

‘Chip Dale’s Diary,’ I said.

‘And what’s it about?’

‘It’s about me. Chip Dale. It’s my diary.’

‘I see. And you have a problem with it?’

‘No, not at all,’ I answered. ‘In fact, it’s looking pretty damn good. I’ve just it redesigned with a picture of my be-thonged rear.’

The line went dead.

Gabby climbed back in from the ledge. ‘She still says she won’t come in,’ she said and brushed hair from her eyes. The blood had stopped pumping from the back of her hand.

‘Why did you have to get her drunk?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t you see she liked the stuff too much?’

‘So, she like wine. I like wine too.’

‘Potato gin is hardly wine,’ I reminded her. ‘And I still don’t see why you had to start playing a knife game with her.’

A scream cut across the conversation and I ran to the window.

The reporter was staring wide eyed at the forecourt below. It was an improvement. Moments earlier she’d been in a trance and convinced that losing the knife game with Gabby meant she had to jump.

‘What am I doing up here?’ she asked, her face a mask of fear.

‘I think she’s sobering up,’ I told Gabby. ‘Don’t worry,’ I shouted to the reporter. ‘Just ease yourself this way and I’ll grab you.’

Surprisingly, she followed my instructions. The last of the gin in her system appeared to give her a little confidence.

‘There you go,’ I said as our hands locked together and I eased the poor woman back into the flat. ‘Now, that’s not so bad is it?’

‘Who am I?’ she asked, disorientated and looking around the room. I was not surprised. Mild amnesia is a common symptom of drinking Gabby’s spirits. But at least the woman’s face was returning to its natural shade of pink and she appeared to be making a quick recovery from her ordeal.

‘You’re a reporter from The Times,’ I said.

She nodded and smiled.

‘I think I remember,’ she answered. ‘And where am I?’

‘You’re in Wales.’

The woman just went white. I handed her the bottle.

Chip Dale's Thought Experiments: The Campaign

I've decided to do something about a travesty that has befallen one of our own. Bryan Appleyard’s Thought Experiments hasn’t updated in days and Bryan is now struggling to get Blogger’s support staff to recognize his problem . I feel his pain. Last week, I too fell victim to Blogger's victimization of the brightest and best and the injustice brings tears to all three of my eyes like I'm wearing a salt and vinegar flavoured thong.

The situation has clearly got out of hand and it's time for The Chipster to pull some strings. I've decided to launch a campaign to free Thought Experiments and Big Frank had produced a rather tasteful logo, which I ask you all to wear on your blogs until Bryan is released from his virtual cell.

Blogger must learn that when they silence one of us, they silence us all. This is about personal liberties, the freedom of the press, and about the virtues of having a stable backend. With your help, I hope to make 'Thought Experiments Saved Through Individuals Campaigning Loudly Enough' the big issue of the coming week and I want T.E.S.T.I.C.L.E. to grow enormously in size. To get the ball rolling, I want 10,000 angry and determined bloggers ready to march on Whitehall on Friday where I hope stage a mass strip involving cats dressed as clowns. Gabby has already taken it upon herself to write the campaign’s song.

What has happened to Thought Experiments?
Oh, what has evil Blogger gone and done?
You weren’t like animal experiments,
Smoking beagles, monkeys with makeup on.

She says it will be better when she’s had a couple more days to work on it…

Some of you might be wondering why I’ve decided to lead this fight. You know how busy I've been lately. But I was persuaded to act when Gabby roused me from my mid-afternoon nap.

Before I was woken, I had been dreaming about Cameron Diaz and a jar of chocolate flavoured mustard so you can no doubt imagine my reluctance to open my eyes. I can normally sleep through one of Gabby’s heckles, only this one had something hard attached to it and resonated as it bounced off my head.

‘Chippy Dale!’ she snapped or more accurately barked from the armchair across the room. ‘Are you awake?’

I raised my eyelids and found myself looking at a slightly dented tin of Cornish shortcrust biscuits lying on my chest.

'Are you even listening to me?' asked the voice full of Romanian impatience.

‘O, speak again, bright angel,’ I said, ‘for thou art as glorious to this night, being o’er my head, as is a winged messenger...

I didn’t get chance to finish. The bright angel sent a permanent marker pen fizzing my way. It was more than enough to stop a man misusing Shakespeare for sarcastic purposes.

‘You are a bad man,’ she said, sitting with my laptop on her knee. ‘You let people down.’

‘Me?’ I protested. ‘Who have I let down?’

Didn’t she know the lengths I go to in order to help people? I wanted to tell her about the last week, about the two thousand word piece on Wallace Stevens I’d written for Ms. Baroque, the trouble I went to attending the Blog Power Awards, and the free show I gave everybody when I whipped off my clothes as I picked up my award. I wanted to mention previous months and all the charity work I’ve done, the time I took attending the British Thong Society. I felt like reminding her of my visit to the old folks home…

She held up hands as if to stop me before I could begin to recount my charity work.

‘You not reply to people who email you,’ she said.

I shuddered at the thought that she’d been reading my mail.

‘Who didn’t I email?’ I asked, suddenly feeling a little exposed lying there naked on the sofa.

‘Mr. Blister,’ she said. ‘He email you this week and you never answer.’

Blood through my heart ran cold. She was right. Dear old Montague Blister had emailed me last week but I’d received the message as I'd been heading out the door. I’d forgotten all about replying to the poor man.

Gabby just tutted with the arrogance of one who is rarely wrong. She tapped away at the keyboard.

‘Lots and lots of emails,’ she said. ‘And you not answer every one.’

I made a resolution that I would email Mr. Blister as soon as I got my laptop back.

‘If you want to be good person like me,' said Gabby, 'you must be good friend to people. You must learn to be selfless, Chippy. Good people do good things.’

‘Like threatening to make sausage meat out of the newspaper boy’s liver?’

‘He noisy,’ she replied. ‘But warning good. Gabby not have him waking neighbours.’

‘I suppose,’ I said, rubbing my head where my own sleep had been interrupted.

She slammed the laptop lid down. ‘You do okay, Chippy. No messages Gabby not like but you must be more considerate to people.’

‘Thank you,’ I replied calmly.

‘No, Chippy. You do very well. No other women. No naked pictures on laptop. No. You do very very good.’

‘I just have to learn to be a better person,’ I agreed.

Gabby just smiled. She had clearly made her point.

I’ll get plenty of chances to be a better person later this week. I have something else to write for Ms. Baroque’s blog, which I’ll get done as soon as I’ve finished groveling to Blister and asking for his forgiveness. For the moment, I just need to thank Ian Grey for the fleshy gift he gave me at the Blog Power awards, though this might need some explaining...

You have to picture the scene. I’d gone up to pick up my award for ‘Most Articulate Wordsmith’ when I decided that I’d give everybody an extra treat my whipping off my thong. A couple of clicks of my mouse and I'd disabled the 'clothes' option and I was standing there, surrounded by dozens of virtual visitors, in my virtual birthday suit. There were, of course, a few gasps and virtual gasps, which I naturally acknowledged with my usual humility. Until, that is, somebody pointed out that I didn’t have any genitals.

The room fell silent.

It was true. I was like an Action Man figure below the waist. I didn't know what to say. I was ready to blame my computer for lacking the processing power to render my genitalia when, thankfully, Ian stepped in and presented me with some genitals from his own collection. So relieved, I foolishly tried them on, without giving any thought as to how they were meant to be worn. I was stunned to discover that they attached themselves to my elbow. It was not a pretty sight and there were some screams in the room. I also attribute the genitals on my elbow with my computer choosing that moment to crash and to dump me back to my desktop.

And that's when I decided that I'd fight the evils of technical glitches. It's why I've decided to head T.E.S.T.I.C.L.E. and it's also why I'm so sure we'll win.

After all, when was the last time you knew a man with a large penis attached to his elbow to be wrong?

Wallace Stevens On Buttocks

I’ve agreed to write something about Wallace Stevens for Ms. Baroque’s blog this week, while she takes time away to have her internal organs recalibrated and tuned to racing perfection. It’s why I was working late last night and fell asleep across my keyboard.

I woke up this morning with a stiff neck and it only got worse when I walked into the kitchen and Gabby slapped me.

‘What’s that for?’ I cried, rubbing my jaw.

She slapped me again. ‘You filth!’ she said and made to hit me again.

‘Whatever is the matter, woman?’ I asked, pinning her arms back before they could unleash any more Romanian fury.

‘That,’ she said, using her nose to point to my forehead. ‘How could you be so rude?’

A quick glance into the silvered side of the egg & muffin toaster revealed that the letters ‘RTYU’ were pressed into my forehead. I didn’t understand what had happened until I figured out that Gabby was seeing it in reverse and that in the Romanian alphabet (which, as you know, is much like ours only backwards), those four letters make up the filthiest word imaginable.

Well, I explained about my falling asleep jaw to spacebar and apologies were soon as plentiful as the orange juice and Alpen. I settled down and read the papers, contemplating Bryan’s excellent article on the nature of good and evil and the chances of peace in a world in which Romanians go to war with the mistaken belief that progress can come by smacking the filthy words from off a tired man’s brow.

It hasn’t been the start to the day I’d wished for.

The only good thing to come of it was that Big Frank rang me to say that all the tinkering with the site is done. I gave him my hearty thanks and asked him about his views on the narrative of ends and the moral quandaries of modern warfare but, to be honest, I think the trouble with my buttocks has been enough for the poor man. He mumbled something about fingers and pies and hung up pretty quickly.

I can’t complain. The site look particularly fine this morning and I think my buttocks look like all buttocks should, which, in the words of Wallace Stevens, is ‘up-rising and down-falling, bares / The last largeness, bold to see’.

Corruption In Higham Places

Corruption! Scandal! Outrage! Hamsters with switchblades!

In my self-appointed role as moral guardian of the UK blogging scene, I’ve stumbled across some pretty shady operations in my time. Let’s not forget the night I sent the coast guard after that high profile blogger who we all knew to be attending illegal hamster fights on a freighter moored at the mouth of the Thames estuary. And I’m sure we all remember the photographs the police later released of the poor little creatures with knives sellotaped to their backs. Is it no wonder that certain people never mention such things in their blogs? And if you don’t believe me, go run a search and you’ll find that the same gentleman never mentions ‘hamsters duelling’. Condemned by his own words, you might say… Shameful.

Yet, no matter how great the depravity of my past discoveries, nothing could have prepared me for what I read this evening.

Tonight I found proof that The Blog Power Awards are fixed.

You heard me right. I said ‘fixed’ and I don’t mind revealing the extent of the corruption.

You see, I’ve discovered that they are nothing but a cheap popularity contest!

You ask how I know this? Well take a look for yourself. There are bloggers out there who are actively canvassing for votes.

I know what you’re thinking and I found it just as hard believe myself. To think that a man we all hold in such esteem is so desperate for approval that he’s asking his readers to email James Higham and nominate him for an award. You don’t see me asking for help, do you? And that’s despite my being nominated in two categories. All I can say is that I’ve had my illusions shattered. I’ve cancelled my order for a dozen black roll-necked sweaters and I’ll never pick up The Sunday Times again. I only worry which of my illusions is next to face a high drop onto a hard surface. Am I to discover that Clive James spends his spring days going from nest to nest in order to hit hatchlings with his tennis racquet? If so, then I only ask that he waits until I've managed to save up and by my signed copy of his Cultural Amnesia...

The simple fact is that your favourite Welsh thongman would never stoop so low as to ask you to love him. And he wouldn’t do that for one very good reason.

It’s all a matter of scale. To make a relevant analogy: when a man feels comfortable with his body, he doesn’t need to add inches the next time he measures himself against the Dear Deride column. You don’t find The Chipster including hips and navels and thumbs to his arithmetic. There is nothing but Dale in his calculations. And when people ask me why I’m a ‘Big Dale’ and not an ‘Average Dale’, I’m always honest and tell them: it’s why I don’t measure myself with a ruler but use a builder’s theodolite. Alternatively, if it happens to be noon on the day of the summer solstice, I do as the Egyptians did and measure myself by calculating how far a shadow is cast in the direction of Luxor.

You see, when it comes to blog popularity, there can be no fair winners. Every loser will have been poorly measured for simple reasons of scale. It’s another example of the big blogs succeeding where we small folk fail. And, for obvious reasons, I chose that term ‘small folk’ very carefully. Popularity can only be measured one way and that’s by visitor numbers and the small fraction who can be bothered to vote for a man in a thong.

It puts a man like me at a great disadvantage. Am I being measured by the length of my readership or the girth of the read? I like to think that my seventeen regular visitors share an experience that comes as close as possible to a night in Bangor town centre on a Saturday night. Can’t you just smell the fragrance of body oil, warmed on the Chipster’s highly toned muscles? Each comma is as calculated as a hip thrust over a tepid glass of Babycham. Each posting amounts to a tangible experience of the best that Welsh stripping has to offer and that, my good friends, is the only reward I expect and care for.

I’m sorry to have had to break this news to you. It’s made for a post full of solemn reflection. I’m a lesser man for having had my illusions shattered. As that great stripper Hugo ‘The Hosepipe’ Cooper used to tell me: leave them with a bang. Even when he was sentenced to three years for male prostitution, I never doubted his advice. Yet today I won’t leave you with a bang. I won’t seek an affirmation of your love. I won't be so cheap as to demean the wonderful thing we have together. I ask that you don’t go voting for the Chipster. No, no, please don’t.

You see, if I don’t play their games, nobody can ever say that I’m small.

Chip Dale Is Away

I’ll go out on a limb and say that Bryan Appleyard writes the best blog out there. Eschewing politics and personal anecdote, he writes a blog that’s eclectic, odd, strange, and weirdly compulsive. It looks into the dark dusty corners of the world and finds curios you never knew existed. They are the misshapen bric-a-brac that make life interesting, or, at least, make our alienation within the world feel somehow more natural. Some say it's morose or gloomy, but I like morose and I love gloomy. Comedy usually begins and ends somewhere in the dark.

I wasn’t at all surprised, therefore, that 'Thought Experiments' featured in the Blog Spot section of The Sunday Times today. They had printed a recent piece about Elton John along with couple of comments from readers. Naturally, I coughed up a lung full of my Alpen oats when I noticed that they chose to print my comment.

This is the first time I’ve ever seen my words in print in a national newspaper. You might think it insignificant but I’m only a stripper in Wales and something like this is life defining. This is, after all, a Paper of Record and it had finally recorded a bit of The Chipster's wisdom. I was also a bit surprised because, to be honest, I always feel a bit out of place leaving comments on a blog where real intellectuals gather. I always feel like the cousin at a family reunion who is a bit slower than his relatives and hasn't 'made good'. Perhaps he’s still not found a wife but does have the world's biggest collection of Jim Reeves records.

I make my comments but wonder if they’re appreciated or merely tolerated.

My comment about Elton John was typically lightweight:

As delighted as I was to see my opinion of Queen Elton in print, all dreams of national fame were dulled when I noticed they'd attributed my comment it to 'Anonymous'. Anonymous!! What’s wrong with ‘Chip Dale’? Is it something about my face or is it just my name? I signed my comment so why make this mistake? Why erase my name from the Paper of Record?

So, I'm left wondering this morning: what’s anonymous about me? The Chipster is more obvious than any other person I know. I stand up on a stage and get naked at least once a week. I’m hardly discreet. You can hardly be more obvious. Perhaps I should write to them and explain their oversight. I could use the opportunity to offer them a piece about life stripping in North Wales.

I could become the A.A. Gill of thongdom.

A Bitter Stripper

I stayed up late last night writing a post I didn’t have chance to finish because the spin cycle on the washing machine came to a premature end and I had to go hang out my thongs to dry. I was intending to finish writing it today but changed my mind after reading the papers.

My thongs are now dry but, unfortunately, I’ve decided to give up blogging.

I’ll probably have a change of heart tomorrow but at the moment The Chipster is feeling very bitter and down. I’m planning on selling off my collection of thongs and getting a proper job. I don’t want to be part of Bangor’s entertainment industry any more. I don’t want to be Welsh. I don’t want to be a man. And I don’t want to be single.

That’s right. I want to be a wife in the north! I want to write about my infirm mother and the things she can do with her false teeth when my father’s standing with his trousers around his ankles flogging her with his belt. I want to write about the whimsical things my dog tells me and the things my children do to beggars they meet on the streets. I want to write long meandering sentences full of apple pie metaphors and smudged similies like finger painted smiles and clowns’ eyebrows.

But, Chipster, I hear you ask, if you want to do that, then why give up blogging?

Well, there comes a point in your life when you think ‘why bother’. Why risk serious pelvic injury every night to dance for audiences who forget you the next day? What’s the point in writing to amuse your readership? What is the point in trying to do something different to the ten million other blogs out there?

Today’s Sunday Times front page had the story I’ve been expecting for weeks. It’s the announcement that ‘The Wife in the North’ has just landed a 70,000 pound publishing deal to turn her blog into a novel.

I wish her well, of course, but I dislike the pretence that this was always just an ordinary woman who decided to start a blog. It’s one of those blogging success stories we all hope will happen to us. Except they don’t happen to us. They don’t happen to ordinary bloggers. They don’t happen to male strippers from Wales. They happen to ex-education journalists from the Sunday Times.

Yet here I am, a real man in a really grim northern (well, the north of Wales) town, stripping for a living, yet nobody wants to hear about the reality of my life ‘up here’.

The Chipster is feeling bitter today and even knowing that he owns Wales’ biggest collection of posing pouches can’t make him feel happy.

UPDATE: Bryan Appleyard has written a wondefully playful piece which just about captures The Chipster’s sentiments. I guess if I’m not the only one thinking this, I’ll be back in my thongs tomorrow.