A New Enterprise

At last, some good news about The Chipster! I’ve found a new source of income. You might know about the trouble I’ve been having lately. Since the EU introduced new regulations on thong usage, the exotic dancing isn’t paying like it used to and I’ve been keeping an eye out for alternative means of supporting a Romanian and her twenty seven chickens. Now, the search is over. Two nights ago I was offered a tempting proposition.

I'd just finished doing a routine in the Shangri-La when a guy I knew from the old days came up to me and complimented me on my physique.

‘You’re looking great, Chip. Been working out?’

‘Every day,’ I said, causally flexing a bicep.

He nodded thoughtfully as he smashed a bottle of lager across my head. When I didn’t flinch, he seemed to take that as a good sign. Of what, I wasn’t quite sure.

‘You have thick skin,’ he said.

I said that I hadn’t noticed.

‘I could do with a man of your unique qualities, Chip. You’re strong like a lion, lithe like an eel, and you don’t cut easily.’

‘Like a Tesco chease and onion pastie?’ I quipped.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Want to earn some money? I mean serious cash?’

I didn’t need asking twice.

‘Well come to this address at nine o’clock tonight,’ he said, scribbling a number of a house near the Bangor docks down on the back of a beer mat. ‘You might want to bring somebody to help you. Preferably somebody with a gentle touch and some medical training.’

I had just the person sitting at home, writing obsessive letters of complaint to the Guinness Book of Records about their unwillingness to consider world records involving razor sharp knives. I told Gabby about the chance of work and she was excited and agreed to help. Not only does she pride herself on her gentility but she’s had five years of medical training at the Romanian territorial commando school.

‘It good Chip get job,’ she said, as we left the flat at eight thirty. ‘You be able to buy car like you want. Perhaps get Mini.’

The thought did excite me. I don’t own a car and the fact that I have to walk or cycle everywhere is good for the heart but less impressive when it comes to my employability. Thoughts of money, success and a larger carbon footprint ensured that I was buzzing by the time we reached the old warehouse. The harbour was silent except for a few drunken merchantmen coming up from a Russian trawler moored by the warehouse.

At the warehouse, we were met by two bulky guys standing guard at the door. One checked my name on a list before the other led us inside and through to an office at the back where my old friend met me.

‘Chip! So glad you could come. People were excited when I mentioned your name.’

‘What’s the gig?’ I asked. ‘Some kind of stripping, I assume?’

‘Stripping? No. Not unless you prefer to fight naked.’

‘Fight?’

‘The game’s bare-knuckle fighting,’ he said. ‘No gouging, no punching below the belt, and no elbows. Other than that, you can do what you want.’

‘I won’t let you do this,’ said Gabby. ‘You must protect your looks, Chippy. Let me fight instead.’

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many John Wayne films lately but I couldn’t let Gabby fight my battles. As for my looks, I had enough confidence in my fighting skills to know I couldn’t get too hurt.

I stripped down to my thong and emerged in a warehouse full of punters. It was there that I met my opponent: a Russian sailor, six three, and probably seventeen stone. He had a scar like a sickle running down his face and into his bottom lip. His name was Sergei and a tattoo on his arm boasted that he’d taken the lives of ten men in the ring and at least two dozen more outside.

I won’t deny that the first three rounds were painful. I’ve not fought in years. I studied the martial arts back when I was a rather wayward teenager. It’s to my shame that I was once considered the best street fighter in Bangor. That’s before I discovered dance and changed to the ways of the thong. This, however, was different. There was money at stake and the continued happiness of a Romanian pop star and her feathered companions.

I held in there, my guts making up for my ring rustiness. Gabby gave me good advice but my reflexes were too slow, honed to the drunken mauling of overweight legal secretaries on a pub crawl. Not ex-Soviet merchant marines with a perchance for headbutting.

About the fourth round, I began to regain my edge. I’d cut the Russian over his eye and I was bruised but fine; my friend's observation about the thickness of my skin proving a good one. A few jabs set up my right hook which lifted the Russian off his feet and set back Glasnost by a decade. The fight was over and the cries of ‘Chipster’ rang around the old warehouse.

I’m fighting again on Sunday when I’ll be up against the Welsh gypsy bare knuckle champion. You’re all invited but the location is still a secret. I’ll try to email you with details sometime on Saturday, so those of you who can make it, I’d welcome your support.

Ned Sherrin's Busted Lip

I got in last night to find the Chipster’s answer phone producing a light show that would induce a fit in man less healthy than I, or at least, one who hasn't spent the last ten years stripping under strobes. At first, I thought it must have been a message of complaint from James Higham, asking me to stop encouraging you all to vote for me in the Blog Power Awards. We’re running neck and neck, though for a few moments last night, I pulled out into the lead for Most Articulate Wordsmith. The idea is that we can each vote once a day and if we can only keep these votes going until Wednesday, we might just steal this one. The question is: can you keep it up? The Chipster intends to push you every inch of the way.

It turns out, however, that the message wasn’t related to the Blog Power Awards. It seems I’d been too hasty in making a judgement earlier in the day. It was a pretty terse message from Fren Britton, telling me that she would be interested in becoming the new honourary president of the British Thong Society and that she’s pretty annoyed that she hadn’t been asked.

If I wasn’t convinced before, this gives me an extra reason why I should now accept the honour. The thing with Fern is that once she gets it into her mind that she wants something, nothing will stop her from getting it. The woman is like American foreign policy. It might take an eternity to decide to move, but once it’s going, it can shift continents whether continents want to be shifted or not.

I had this problem with her a year or so ago. Those of you new to Chip Dale’s Dairy probably don’t know about the run in I had with dear Fern when ‘This Morning’ came to Wales for a week during the assembly elections.

I’d been invited on the show to talk about my life as the country’s top male stripper and also explain why I was then such a huge supporter of the Lib Dem cause. At first, everything was going well. The lawyers had passed my thong for morning viewing and, so long as I didn’t turn my back to the camera, I'd be litigation free. I’d been fully made up by a make-up lady who said she hadn’t seen a tan as real as mine since the days she used to work with the late Bob Monkhouse. Of course, he wasn’t the late Bob Monkhouse back then and his tan was better than it’s been lately, which made it quite the compliment.

After that, I went out onto the studio floor where I began limber up in a corner. That's when Fern came across. Turns out that she’d taken offence at the way I’d bent over. I don’t want to get into the biological descriptions of what she claims to have seen but there was an accusation that my thong had not covered something that should have been covered and a previous evening’s meal had been on display. She mentioned 'prawns'...

You might say that her interest in thong development began at that moment because it turned into a heated argument about the right way to wear a thong. Then she told me that she didn’t want me on the show and asked me to leave the studio. Of course, having travelled all the way from Bangor to Cardiff, I wasn’t too happy and I told her as much.

I regret pretty much everything that happened from that moment on.

Old Schofield tried to act as peacemaker but the man has too kind a heart. He tried to lift Fern off me as we scrapped on the floor. He should have kept well back. He caught Fern’s leg in his mush and then he just went crazy! He was lashing out in all directions and even Fern looked frightened as he overturned a studio camera and then turned his fury on Ned Sherrin who ended up with a busted lip. Poor old Ned should learn the time and place for a wry bon mot.

In the end, it took the common sense of Shane Richie to calm things down. Fern nipped back to make up to have power put on her bruised knuckles and I was led limping from the studios, swearing that I’d never make another appearance on morning TV. And to this day, I haven’t.

I don't know why I've told you all this except by way of asking you to vote for me. But I hope you've done that already and all ready to vote for me again tomorrow.