Chocolate Chip

When Gabby poked me with the end of a broom this morning, I knew it was time for my triumphant return to the world of blogging. There were too many things that needed to be said.

'Chip, you get out of bed right now!' she scolded as she pressed the handle into my right buttock. 'You dirty dirty man! Dirty!'

I could see the reasons for Romanian disgust. I'd gone to sleep a little too quickly last night and the thick chocolate mousse that covered a good deal of my torso had hardened in the night; and I hadn't had chance to explain any of this to my darling partner.

The 'why' had been my first successful booking since I went dormant a few months ago and began to pile on the pounds. Last night, I performed at the Green Dragon Tavern with the world première of my Oompa-Loompa strip in which I begin dressed in white overalls and with an orange face, and end up rolling around in a inflatable pool filled with chocolate. It's less Dahl and more Dalí with a touch of the Béatrice Dalle once I get my underwear off.

How the women of Bangor loved it and loved me. Such had been my success that two hours at the bar had left me totally drunk and with only the wits to get back to the flat. When I got home, around three o'clock this morning, I crawled into bed and fell into a deep and blissful sleep.

Now everything is explained and I'm washed, I can say it's good to be back and such a relief to be taking off my clothes again for a living. A full pouch last night has paid off months of debt as well as doing so much for my self-esteem. For a few weeks in January, I even had trouble finding thongs to fit me but I can assure you that everything is now normal down there. Ship shape and Bristol fashion, as they say, except, of course, there's nothing down there that's shaped like a ship.

Just a large stealthy submarine with a full compliment of hip thrusts that are fully armed and aimed in your direction.

As for this blog, I hope to be writing more often. I'm starting work on a most interesting project that I might just share with you...

Quality Street My Arse!

I hate being treated as an idiot by a big corporation, so when I was handed a box of Quality Street today, I knew I’d have to find five minutes to sit down, brood, and then write about the stinging wart on the behind of the British confectionery industry.

Those damn heathens, wearing their sheep’s testicle necklaces and waving dead chickens over piles of fuming herbs, they have gone and done it again. Nestlé have introduced two new chocolates to the Quality Street family. And what might those two new chocolates be, you ask? Do you anticipate the ‘Mint Sensation’, a mint cream wrapped in dark chocolate? Or maybe it’s that ‘Lemon zest’, a lemon flavoured cream in milk chocolate? Or you might not like soft centers, so how about a Hazelnut Blob, or a Walnut Whizz, or a bloody Nougat Knob?! No, no, and no. Apparently this is all too obvious to the witch doctors at Nestlé. Not when they can introduce the world to the taste sensation that is the ‘Milk Choc Block’ and, wait for it, ‘The Toffee Deluxe’. The Toffee Deluxe! I feel ulcers bursting in the sugary corner of my digestive tract. What the hell is ‘deluxe’ about caramel? It’s burnt sugar! How much more cheap could an ingredient be?

Every person on the planet knows that caramel is the most miserable substance on the earth. The devil god of confectioners created when he was cast from Belgium. Buy a tin of Quality Street at Christmas and you can guarantee that by New Year’s Day there’ll be nothing but Toffee Pennies left at the bottom. So why introduce another toffee we are all sure to avoid? It says on the box: ‘Indulge yourself with toffee deluxe – our rich, buttery toffee wrapped in smooth milk chocolate’. Give me a break! Come on, Nestlé, I’m sure you could save yourself another fraction of a penny per box by taking space up with another cheap-to-produce lump of flavourless gunk? What the world needs now is another version of the Caramel Keg! Your copywriters can make something scraped from a kennel sound exciting. ‘Why not treat yourself to the Doggy Delight, a luxurious lump of faeces wrapped in a delicious dark chocolate’?

As for ‘the choc block’, it’s chocolate wrapped in chocolate. There can be nothing cheaper unless they wrap air, which, let’s face it, is what they do every Christmas and Easter when the thickness of the chocolate in novelties and eggs get thinner and thinner. A ‘choc bloc’ is hardly a confectionery innovation and I’m damn sure it doesn’t excite me when they advertise it on the box in lovely clip art stars with ‘New’ in glowing letters. As for it being ‘a bite sized block of creamy milk chocolate’… Bite sized? For who? A midget, perhaps, or a small Persian cat. A one year old baby with a very tiny jaw.

I get so utterly fed up of corporations selling us things with words that attempt to disguise reality. Small cars are ‘compact’, ugly cars are ‘exciting’ or ‘innovative’. When Renault launched the Megane, they disguised the fact it has a terrible rear by showing us images of women's bottoms. The car was still ugly but like one of Ivan Pavlov's dogs, I now drool every time I see one drive past.

Nestlé operate their ‘new cholocate’ scam so they can these cheap ‘new’ chocolates we’d never choose to eat take up space that was previously occupied by chocolates you might actually enjoy. How many Orange Creams, Strawberry Creams, and the Hazelnuts do they save with this little example of penny-pinching? We’re being screwed on a global scale. Sod ethical business practices and all the stuff that gets Mark Thomas’ goat. What about being able to buy a decent box of reasonably priced chocolates? I don’t eat chocolate that often and when I do I usually prefer something expensive but delicious, even it is means only having a very small quantity. Don’t give me fudge! I hate fudge! And don’t call it a ‘fondant center’ when you mean fudge. I just want to share a box of chocolates with my family knowing that I'm not going to have to elbow my own mother in the face just to get to the orange cream.

Nestlé, I’m onto your game, you cheap miserable bastards. The Chipster says wake up and smell the cocoa.

A Cadbury’s Cream GDA

The Chipster may have one mighty hell of a great bod, or at least that’s what the softer population of Bangor tell him, but he does have a weakness when it comes to chocolate. I’m a man who just can’t say no to a Cadbury’s Cream egg. It’s my Achilles heel, or at least my Achilles’s molar. I’m like a drunk who’s gone too long without tasting whisky if I go a week without a little chocolate in my diet.

Gabby knows this, bless her vagrant little Romanian heart, which is possibly why she bought me a box of four eggs today and left them on my laptop for when I got back from the gym. Unfortunately, I’d left the power on and I returned home to find that one of the eggs had melted over my brand new laptop. I couldn’t fault Gabby for trying. After all, what’s a Sony Vaio compared to the love of a flexible Romanian?

To keep myself cheerful while I tried to get rapidly hardening chocolate from the keyboard, I thought I’d have one of the three (thank you Casio calculator) remaining eggs. I reached for the box and was about to tuck in when I noticed that a warning had been printed on the front.

‘Be treatwise,’ ts said, ‘get to know your GDAs’.

GDAs?

If you’re like me, you’ll have no idea what a GDA looks like. I had no idea I had even one let alone enough to make them plural. I wouldn’t even know how to sponge them down when I’m in the shower.

So, do I hear you ask, what is a GDA?

After much searching, I discovered that they have nothing to do with The Global Development Alliance, the Greater Dublin Area, the Governor Dummer Academy, or even the Gastroduodenal artery (thanks for nothing Wikipaedia), I visited www.betreatwise.org.uk and found out that it means Guideline Daily Allowance. In practice, this means that a single Cadbury Cream egg contains 28.2% of my daily sugar and 0.8% of my daily salt. I could go one but it would only depress you. I did a bit of thinking about this. A box of four eggs give me all my sugar for the day, but I’d have to eat 125 of the things to get enough salt.

I hope you can see my dilemma. These figures seem to make it difficult in the extreme to find a happy balance between the two.

When I thought about it long enough, I began to get the feeling that I could detect the hand of the government in this warning. They get their fingers in every pie, or in this case, in every cream egg. Once you realise this, you have to say that you just can’t beat them. I may as well put my broad oily shoulders behind the scheme and convert to the GDA.

I’ve rang the man who does my website graphics to make me one that says Chip Dale’s Diary contains 73% of your recommended daily amount of bullspit, 13% of your daily wit and wisdom, and only 2% of your chuckles. I’m considering putting a similar warning on all my thongs. I think my audiences should be warned. This item may contain up to 89% of your daily recommended amount of genital.

After I’d arranged all of this, I realised I no longer wanted my cream egg. I’ve left them out for Gabby. She’s Romanian and as you know, that blessed nation refuse to be ruled by anything that comes in the form of a percentage.

Lucky people.