It's Only Us Chickens

And into the unpublished pile goes the page I’ve just written about why I’m not feeling funny today… You see, somebody sent me a pretty abusive email this morning and it made me begin to wonder why I bother blogging at all. But at least it made me angry. Angry enough to tell you that I carry on because a Romanian girlfriend who thinks she’s a pop star based on a number seven hit with the ‘Hokey Cokey’ is about as funny as life gets. Surely her’s is a tale that needs telling, especially when she comes home with a cockerel she bought from a man she met at her pilates class.

Gabby is mixing with the more unusual side of Bangor society these days and her cockerel is pecking around my ankles as I type. It’s not a totally disagreeable sensation, though having a cock at my ankles is perhaps symbolic of how far my spirits have drooped this week.

‘You like Chippy?’ she had asked the bird as she nuzzled it over my breakfast table. The bird had said nothing but fixed me with its bead of an eye. Fowl are not known for their appreciation of the finer things in life and certainly have little or no regard for a Welshman in a thong at ten thirty in the morning.

‘And where do you intend to keep our guest?’ I asked as I spooned another load of Alpen into my mouth.

‘Guest?’ laughed Gabby. ‘What guest? Only you, me, and bird. Bird is no guest. Bird is family now.’

‘Well Bird must be on your side of the family,’ I told her. ‘No Dale I know of has only three toes.’

‘There’s your uncle Jimmy,’ she reminded me.

‘Industrial accidents are hardly genetic,’ I replied. ‘Or at least they’re not unless you’re from Liverpool…’

‘You’re trying to be funny,’ she said as the cockerel made a noise in its throat. ‘See! Only Bird laughs. I don’t.’

And with that, I accepted Bird as part of the family. I knew, that way, at least one member of the household would find me a little bit amusing in the morning.

Gabby’s reasons for buying the cockerel are actually quite good. She’s going to set up a small business breeding chickens. She claims that she used to do this back in the old country and has been encouraged to start again after reading about Bernard Matthews who started out with only a couple of turkeys. She has ambitions of owning old aircraft hangers, full to the struts with chickens. The enterprise is to begin at the allotments, which is where she’s been fermenting her potato gin these last few months. She has sheds down there and has become something of a pin up for the gardening fraternity. The chickens will have a free run of the ground where she’s been growing potatoes.

At eleven, the doorbell rang. Gabby was in the bath with her cockerel so I answered it.

‘Ah, I wonder if I might have a word with the lady of the house?’ asked a man in blue overalls. He was in his fifties, grey hair had ebbed to leave behind a pale pink tidemark of skin. He also had that style of thin moustache that went out in the fifties. ‘You are Mr. Dale?’ he asked.

‘I am,’ I replied, gesturing down to my personalised thong which reads ‘Chip Dale’ in a hardly discreet font.

‘Of course you are,’ smiled the man, his eyes flicking briefly southwards. ‘May I have a word with your wife, Mr. Dale?’

‘I’m not married,’ I said and again gestured to my thong as though it’s the answer to everything. Which, of course, it is.

‘Oh, but I was told Mrs Gabby Dale lives here…’

I shook my head. It’s not the first time that Gabby has been using my surname. She claims it gives her a cloak of anonymity in her business deals but I think she gets tired of trying to spell her surname.

‘She’s in the bath,’ I explained. ‘But she’s not my wife. She’s my Romanian girlfriend.’

‘In which case,’ said the man. ‘I’ll wait.’ And with no more ado, he brushed me aside and entered the flat.

No sooner had the man seated himself on the sofa than Gabby came out of the bathroom, walked straight through the flat, heading to the bedroom. The bird followed her, as did the man’s eyes. He’d clearly never seen a naked Romanian followed by a cockerel before.

‘With you in moment, birdman,’ said Gabby. ‘Chip make you drink. Chip make drink for birdman.’

‘Whisky if you’ve got any,’ said the man, looking a little flushed.

‘Can’t say I don’t blame you,’ I replied, going to fill two glasses.

‘I’m here about the hens,’ explained the man. ‘My name is Green. Graham Green.’

‘Ah, like the writer,’ I said, ready to tell him about my FE classes in English Literature.

‘Without the terminating e,’ he explained and then added. ‘I’m not a writer. I’m in the poultry business. The young lady is interested in buying hens to compliment her cockerel.’

‘A cockerel like that probably needs a lot of complimenting,’ I pointed out.

‘Oh, aren’t all men the same, Mr. Dale?’

I again gestured to my thong. He nodded his head in agreement.

After that, business was concluded quite quickly. Gabby returned and agreed to buy twenty three hens, to be delivered to the allotments that afternoon. I kept pretty quiet until the end when we were showing Mr. Green out.

‘One thing,’ he said, pausing in the doorway. ‘I suggest you don’t leave these hens alone for a night or two.’

‘Surely we shouldn’t bother them on their wedding night,’ I observed. Gabby elbowed my in my ribs but I felt the pain in my thong.

‘You should be around until you’ve tested your defences,’ explained Green. ‘A fox could kill them all in an evening.’

And that’s where Gabby is now: arranging to have a double wire fence put around the allotment and buried to a foot below ground to stop any foxes from tunneling under. The hens are to be delivered this afternoon and I’m to expect a phone call anytime now to tell me to take the cockerel to its new lodgings.

The most significant thing about the whole episode is that it turns out that Gabby has to travel to Glasgow this evening, and since the birds can’t be left alone, I’ll be guarding them for the next couple of days. I’ve got myself a sleeping bag, a camp bed, a torch, and more potato gin than is totally sensible to give a man when he’s feeling a bit down.

So, tonight, as you sit blogging by the fire, spare a thought for me and the chickens.

All The Rest

The life of the exotic dancer is not an easy one. Many of us start the day with a stiff drink just to forget the indignity of the night before. It’s how I imagine the Prime Minister feels every time he wakes up. Or perhaps he doesn’t. Tony Blair will have ridden the spirit out of his demons. Dancers rope new demons every time we perform.

Though I try my best to hide it, I too find myself occasionally rinsing whisky over my gums in the belief that it will work as a tonic on my depressed nerves. These low days are days when I can’t find reasons within me to shave, to dress, to eat, or even to write. Only the last of these make me feel disappointed with myself. You might find it hard to believe but I write this blog only out of a deep sense of unworthiness. Life in north Wales is not easy. Money is hard to come by. Happiness is a brittle as the winter sunlight.

I first met Jane when I first started out working in the clubs. She worked the poles in Rhyl and I was then only working behind the bar. I was barely eighteen and Jane was much older, so we formed a happy platonic friendship. Eventually she would become my mentor and teach me my first dance moves, but over the course of those first few weeks working in the club, we’d meet up in our breaks and talk, telling each other our life stories. Jane told me about her fight with depression and make a bad joke about her being the only bipolar pole dancer. She also talked about how she coped with a life that bought her into daily contact with bad choices. I didn’t understand then how difficult it is to hold yourself above that world that lies below all of us. The professional dancer fights a daily struggle to remain above the lower world of drugs, prostitution, and pornography. We choose to live lives shunned by many but not without its own morality.

But Jane taught me one important lesson. She told me that I should never let the bad days pass by without doing at least one good thing; something that in the quiet hours of the night, I could look back on and say ‘well that was worth all the rest’.

Tonight, when I lie in bed, I’ll look back on this bad black day and I’m sure I’ll feel a small sense of delight in knowing that I remembered Jane and wrote something about her.

This was worth all the rest.