At Knifepoint With Cultural Amnesia

Sorry for the slightly late in the day update, Chipettes. I’ve had to take a day’s rest and force myself to watch a pretty dull FA Cup final. Not that I’m complaining about their being a lack of excitement in the Chipster household. I had enough of that yesterday, which started with me trying to make a five pounds saving and ended at the point of a paperknife.

We’d gone over to Birmingham to see Gabby’s management team who are still working hard to come up with a hit as big as the hokey cokey. We spent the lunch hour browsing the local Borders, which is where I’d intended to buy Clive James’s new book of essays, Cultural Amnesia. I’d had a quick browse through the book, read the opening paragraphs on James’ piece of W.C. Fields, which I thought made it worth the cover price alone, and I was making my way to the counter when Gabby leapt out from the bargain books brandishing a novelty paperknife in the shape of Count Duckula.

‘What that?’ she growled.

‘What what?’ I asked, having quickly hid six hundred pages or more behind my back.

‘What you buy, Chippy?’

‘I buy nothing I said, truthfully, as I tried to slip into the aisle of murder mysteries before I was involved in one myself.

But it was too late. The great Romanian sleuth ran a finger over her waxed moustache, grabbed my wrist, and dragged the book out into the open where everybody could see my profligacy.

‘How much?’ she asked, knife waving around my loins.

‘Twenty pounds… a five pound saving off he cover price,’ my loins replied.

‘You not pay twenty pounds for this,’ she said. ‘You put it back right now.’

I might have reminded her about the copy of my English Auden which she and her cabal of free versifiers has munched their way though yesterday.

‘I won’t put it back you heathen,’ I hissed. ‘I’m buying it. He’s making an excellent case for not being so intellectually dry as to ignore every form of culture.’

‘Culture?’ she spat. ‘We save for holiday to Romania!’

‘Save away,’ I said. ‘I’m buying the Clive James.’

She raised Count Duckula menacingly.

‘Step back,’ she warned. ‘Gabby not allow Chippy to waste our money.’

‘It’s thong money,’ I said.

She stabbed at the book with the opener. ‘How much on Amazon?’

‘That’s not the point…’

‘How much on Amazon?’

‘Twelve pounds,’ I admitted.

‘Then you buy from Amazon or Gabby stick you with paper knife in shape of duck.’

And there she had me. It was a duck. And Clive James’ latest book is indeed twelve pounds on Amazon. But, then, there’s also something in buying a book and walking out with it. It’s never the same when the postman arrives with the Amazon crate.

Yet in favour of Amazon: have they ever tried to slice off your manhood with something made for envelopes? Precisely. And that’s exactly how I imagine a certain cultural critic would have responded to these most trying of times…

A Confession About A Mole

I recently sold a mole on eBay.

I don’t say this lightly or meaning to shock you. I say this as a matter of fact and as a way of absolving myself of a terrible episode which has blighted my conscience for many months. You might say I should have told you sooner, but I feel like we’re only just getting to know each other. I thought a thing like a mole might come between us. You might have thought the Chipster a little odd. You might have decided not to come back and visit him.

The mole actually belonged to a friend of mine and it had come into my possession after he suffered a serious grazing incident on the rowing machine at the local gym. I didn’t even know I had it until I came home and took my towel from my bag that night. We’d used the towel to help stop poor Thompson’s bleeding but, when I came to put it in the wash, I noticed that a small piece of Thompson had become stuck to the towel. Gabby wasn’t at all impressed. She’s seen worse things than a slightly bloody mole. Remember that this is a woman who wanted to slaughter a goat in our flat and she would have done so if I hadn’t come home and found her trying to hang the poor creature up by its hind legs from the shower rail. I managed to get the goat out of the flat and I led it to freedom on some fields just outside Bangor. The mole was a different story. That was something I decided to keep.

I kept it because, at the time, the news was full of crazy stories about the odd things that get good prices on eBay. I was in a particularly contrary mood so I went online and advertised it as a genuine mole as removed from Liz Hurley’s inner thigh. The fact that a few hairs were still embedded into the mole only seemed to add to the item’s authenticity to the eBay crowd. By the end of the first night, the bids had shot past two hundred pounds.

The whole thing was an unreal experience, especially when, a week later, it came to packing the mole away and taking it to the post office. moles are not easy things to wrap, and I used to much bubble wrap believing, I think, I needed to hide the real contents. You might say that guilt had a lot to do with it. The Royal Mail has probably delivered very few moles in their time and I tend to think that there’s probably a good reason for that. The postage alone came to nearly ten pounds once I’d insured the mole to the value of five hundred pounds.

It was all as a amusing as hell, and, as you can tell, profitable too, until a month later when the phone rang.

‘Is this Dale?’

‘Chip Dale,’ I said.

‘My name is Reed. You might remember you sold me a mole.’

‘Ah, yes…’ I said, my heart beginning to race. ‘Liz Hurley’s mole.’

‘Or so you claimed. Listen, I’m at Bangor railway station. I’m on my way to see you.’

‘Oh, but this really isn’t that convenient.’

‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ he said and rang off.

What could I do? I wanted to hide, or at least not answer the door, but part of me knew I’d done a bad thing and I had to make ready for the consequences. Reed arrived in less than five minutes and he carried a little package tucked under his arm.

‘So,’ I said, prevaricating a little. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘It’s about this mole,’ he said, placing the box down on the coffee table. ‘I’m an accountant, you see, Mr. Dale. And I have friends who are accountants and one of my friends is one of the best tax accountants there are. He does all the big accounts and he recently happened to be doing Liz Hurley’s tax returns. He mixes with all the stars and he’s never awestruck. That’s probably why he got around to telling her that I’d just bought one of her old moles. Well, you can imagine my friend’s surprise when she told him that she’d never had any moles removed and that she’s never had any moles at all.’

‘Liz Hurley said that,’ I asked and let out a slight whistle.

He smiled. ‘You see, my predicament, Mr. Dale? My whole collection of Miss Hurley’s moles lost their authenticity right there and then.’

‘Did you say your whole collection?’

He gestured to the box. ‘Nineteen, to be exact. Nineteen moles in mint condition.’

‘Nineteen?’ I repeated. ‘But I only sold you the one.’

‘There are many more sellers on eBay than your good self, Mr. Dale. A man who searches hard enough can find everything he wants on eBay. Cost me a small fortune but I probably now have the world’s finest collection of Liz Hurley’s moles that money can buy. But it leads me to a rather difficult question.’

I could feel the moment coming and I was thinking about where I’d left my wallet. I could see I’d soon be making a trip to the cash machine to rob it of the five hundred pounds this man had paid me for a piece of my friend Thompson.

‘I understand,’ I sighed and stood up.

‘You do?’ he said. ‘I mean, how could you? I’ve not asked you yet.’

‘Well it’s obvious isn’t it?’

‘Mr. Dale, you’re the first person I’m going ask.’

‘Ask what?’

He stood up to look me in my eyes. The moment was suddenly loaded with meaning, as though his question meant the world to him.

‘Will you act as a witness when I take this case to court?’

‘What case?’

He sighed and shook his head. ‘Miss Hurley has made a terrible allegation about the authenticity of my collection and I intend to see the matter settled in court. She must retract her statement. My collection is too valuable to allow these gross rumour to circulate. So, I ask you again, Mr. Dale. Will you stand as a witness?’

What could I say? I argued with the man for another hour, suggesting that he allow me to buy the mole back from him but all he could do was sit there and look vaguely superior. ‘That mole is the finest one in my collection,’ he said. ‘It’s the only one with one of Liz’s hairs in it!’

I wondered about confessing all and telling him about my friend Thompson and his accident with the rowing machine. In the end, I had to settle on dissuading him from expecting testimony from me. I explained that I would prove a poor witness on account of having all my life thought moles were disgusting.

‘I’d be a hostile witness, you see?’ I said and stumbled onto the one reason that finally convinced him. ‘You see, Mr. Reed, why would I want to sell one of Liz Hurley’s moles in the first place?’

He took my point, clapping me around the shoulder in a way meant to say much about the camaraderie between mole collectors. He left me that afternoon and I’ve never seen him again. I read in the newspapers that he’d tried to approach Miss Hurley at a movie premier only to be brushed aside by her security guards. The paper also reported that he had fallen into the road, where a box he was carrying had gone under the wheels of a taxi. That, I think, is what happened to part of my friend Thompson, stuck to the wheel of a London taxi cab.

There’s a moral to this story but I’m really not so sure what it is. Probably it’s something to do with being careful about what you buy off eBay. Then again, it could be about the easy money you can make if you have a friend called Thompson who has plenty of moles.

I really don’t know which. I think I’ll let you make up your own mind.

Grim Lessons In Reality and Tchaikovsky

Fellow Thongateers, forgive The Chipster’s silence. He’s only now feeling a little better, or at least, well enough to sit up in his sickbed, nestle himself in the cool socket formed by two neatly plumped clean pillows, and type a few words.

This strain of human flu has been a tonic if you’re the type of person who enjoys groaning for motionless hours in bed watching the football all weekend long. It’s ideal if you want to wake up at three thirty in the morning, pawing for the cold spot in your sheets, hoping that they might help ease the sweatless fever. And it’s a real blessing if you then turn on the TV and find ‘Rediscovering Tchaikovsky’ on BBC4 and it awakens a latent interest in classical music. In a way, this flu hasn’t been too bad at all. In fact, it’s been an education and I’m listening to Tchaikovsky’s sixth symphony as I type. And it really isn’t ‘Pathétique’.

Yet despite all of its evident virtues, this flu has been useless if you’re a Welsh exotic dancer who has just started to blog. Even worse if you’ve wanted to say something deep and meaningful about the death of Anna Nichole Smith last week. But as I’ve said, I’m now feeling a little better. So before the paracetamol drive me to sleep, allow me to explain why I think our collective fascination with a woman known for her life in soft porn is being wrongly portrayed as the death of culture, if not civilisation itself. And I say this, not as a stripper, not even as a man, but as an average human being, albeit suffering a mild form of plague.

Anna Nichole Smith may now only be known as somebody ‘famous for being famous’, but there’s a reason so many have been fascinated by her and her death. And, odd as it may seem, I think it does us all very great credit.

That reason came to me tonight. Shivering under the duvet, I couldn’t be bothered to lift my hand to turn off the BAFTA awards. My infirmity didn’t last. I found a cure for it as soon as Jonathan Ross began his excruciating opening monologue. It also had the extremely strange symptom of making me wish that they’d get Stephen Fry back. It really was that bad. I’ve had funnier accidents with lit matches.

As I moved to turn over, my finger loitered on the remote control long enough that I saw a few of the deathly silences. Ross seemed unperturbed and you could have swabbed the man down with shame and find not a microbe sticking to him. And that’s when something suddenly unlocked the enigma of Anna Nichole Smith for me. You might call it an epiphany but I call it seeing a glaring sense.

It happened like this. Ross made a poor joke about the theatre being ‘stuffed as tightly as Daniel Craig’s trunks’ and the camera immediately cut straight to Craig in the audience. He looked stony faced. The joke wasn’t the funniest but I would have expected him to respond in some way. It’s what we humans do when somebody makes a playful joke at our expense. When I strip, there’s always one shy member of a hen party who feels embarrassed at my attention but they always smile politely. I’ve never known different. It’s just what we do.

Only Craig didn’t smile. Or he doesn’t smile. He just sat there looking… well… looking just as we would expect James Bond to look while M instructs him to kill a Cuban drug lord. I gave the matter no thought until the camera had gone to him on a couple more occasions after more of Ross’s feeble quips (he really needs better writers), and each time, Craig’s face was impassive. He stared into the middle distance looking about as pleasant as being cold-cocked by the butt end of a Walther PPK.

And that’s when it struck me. Craig has been told to act like Bond in his everyday life. That or he is just a man without a witty bone in his body. I may find it hard to believe the latter but I’m easily convinced about the former. In this culture, where francises of all kinds are so eagerly managed, it seemed only right that the current James Bond looks the part. It’s why previous Bonds have struggled so hard to establish themselves as something other than Bond: by growing beards, going bald, going back to the theatre, or dropping out of acting completely. Accepting the role of Bond means accepting the lifestyle that goes with it. It’s about adopting the personae. Craig is now Bond. And he clearly takes his job very seriously indeed.

Which suddenly made me feel a very great affection for Anna Nichole Smith.

I was never a fan but I recognised her on TV. She had the sort of beauty that makes you realise why Americans love their real meat. She has substance and was no European waif. Yet I wouldn’t post a naked picture of her here because, among other things, being around nudity all day makes me more respectful of other people’s dignity. I know as much about her as is usual to know if you’ve read the newspapers for the last decade. I know she married an ailing billionaire, who died, leaving his young wife to inherit his fortune. She spent a decade contesting the will with his family while establishing herself as a star of reality TV. Before all of this, she was famous as a Guess jeans model and I remember the stunning black and white photographs of her in film magazines of the time, not knowing who she was. She achieved some more celebrity in one of the Naked Gun films and, all along, was known as one of the decade’s faces of Playboy.

But what I now think I know about Anna Nichole Smith is that she was exactly as she appeared.

Her life was a mess. She fought weight problems. She fought addictions. She lost a son last year only days after giving birth to a new daughter. Paternity tests are now being demanded and fortunes rest on the outcome. She was no actress but used her body to achieve a kind of success in the field of glamour modelling. It would not be a guess to say that she was hardly the brightest person on the planet, but then again, who is? And this is my point.

Anna Nichole Smith was a fleck of reality that got lodged under the lens. She was the hair in the corner of the frame. Her life reminded us that the sun does not always shine on the land below the Hollywood hills. When she pouted for the cameras, it reminded us of the fraud committed in the name of glamour. It was never larger than life, but a parody of life. The same is true when she appeared incoherent at an awards ceremony like the American version of Oliver Reed but with infinitely less talent or anger. Above all, hers was a face which, despite all the abnormal things of her life, exemplified a grim troubled reality that could not be fixed by clever spin. She was the opposite to Craig.

And the strange thing I think, as the tablets kick in and I feel my head reeling, is that David Cameron could learn a few lessons from her.

Cameron may have done drugs as a young man at Eton. He chooses to neither confirm nor deny the stories, which is his choice to make and we should respect him for that. Yet what we can judge is how he decides to manage the reality. At the moment, he is Daniel Craig sitting impassively in the studio audience. He is acting the role of Prime Minister in waiting. He fears that the general public with run away if he acknowledges any wrongdoing. He won’t acknowledge reality. He wears the watches, drives the cars, inhabits the suits, all paid for by his sponsors in the Tory Party.

Yet the reason why Anna Nichole Smith’s death touched so many people is because she had a quality that the public recognises that it so abundantly lacks. Fragility can be a virtue. It made a Texan stripper into a model of imperfect grace. Perhaps it can turn our politicians into something other than those mannequins that have stood in Downing Street for the last decade. Perhaps they can become representatives of the people who put them where they are. People like you and me, and even like Anna Nichole Smith.