The Nasal Strategy

The Chipster had already gone seriously nasal by the time one of the neighbours turned up on my doorstep this morning.

I don’t know if you’re aware of this but I have a problem with hair growing out of my nose. I blame my Estonian heritage. Our family were renowned for having the hairiest nostrils in the small village of Pslatina and I’ve carried on the tradition, being prone to sudden spurts of hair growth the likes of which have been known to suffocate a man.

This is the reason I’ve always taken my grooming so very seriously. If I’m honest, it’s probably why I got into the whole stripping business in the first place. From an early age, I discovered the pleasure in taking care of my body. It’s why I own the heaviest duty clippers you can find; the type they use in to top barber shops. They are a fearsome weapon in the wrong hands. A person could lose an eyebrow or an ear, which is why I normally clear the living room when I’m about to trim my nostrils. I like to give myself plenty of elbow room.

I’m also full of interesting facts about nostrils. Did you know, for example, that humans only use one nostril at a time? Through the course of the day, our active nostril changes once every four hours and this is called the nasal cycle. This morning, my left nostril was open so I had begun by making my first foray into the right naris. That’s when I looked up and saw Gabby and one of our neighbour standing in the hall doorway and watching me. You’d think they’d never seen a totally naked man clipping his abnormally long nose hairs before.

Gabby distracted him as I slipped out to wrap a towel around my 'career assets' and, when I came back, she explained how Tony had stopped her at the lift to ask her about joining the Lib Dems. She thought he should speak to me since I’m the one who insists on putting all the stickers on the car.

The man proved himself to be a complete heathen when it came to politics. The first thing he told me was that he’d voted Labour at every general election except one when he ‘went Green’. He now wanted to know how easy it was to ‘join the orange’. I gave him the usual handouts and one of those good picture of Sir Menzies… You know the ones, where he has his teeth in… And he seemed reasonably pleased. Then we got to talking about identity cards which it turned out was the only reason Tony wanted to join us. Not a word about our being the only party with a comprehensive thong policy.

I admit that I didn’t tell him that the Tories have now also come out and announced that they’ll scrap the ID card scheme as soon as they get into government. It's a clever move by David Davis is leaves the Labour lot looking like a right bunch of lemons. A bunch of totalitarian freedom-slapping corrupt lemons at that.

But there’s a bigger issue at work here and that’s what I wanted to say in today’s ‘report from Bangor’. It’s about knowledge and about how much information the government collect about us.

Tony Blair’s years in government have been marked by the government’s belief in the power of information. Ever day databases grow constantly larger as more evidence is compiled about us at huge expense to the tax payer by a government that believes that power gravitates to those that rule information. Which may be true to a point when the data sets are small, confined to closed systems, but it doesn’t really work for governments whose remit is the world and whose subject is human behaviour.

What New Labour have consistently failed to understand is that we are all able to demonstrate free will, that lively spark of human irrationalism which lives within us all. Somebody will always copy the emails the computer experts said were deleted. Not everybody will agree with a policy that they tell us is self-evidently sensible. Given the full facts of any given situation, the government will always fail to anticipate the actions of a single human. Somebody somewhere will always upset the cart full on monkeys.

I’ve just read about (and here) the Home Office's plans to crack down on internet paedophiles by making 'sex offenders […] register their e-mail addresses and chatroom names.’ Again, do they really expect human nature to conform to their petty rules? Those willing to commit a sexual offence are surely not beyond misrepresenting themselves with false names and email accounts. These days any fool can go to Yahoo! and create a fake identity.

The identity card scheme was flawed from the moment Charles Clarke showed us all the prototype card and we all realised that his ears had been cut off on the photograph. The human spirit refuses to be bound by such a measly lump of plastic. Whether it’s a man with pan-like ears or my unfeasibly quick growing nostril hair, human life is unpredictable. You can’t gather information about it. You simply have to be ready at the other end to beat it back with a big stick or the most powerful pair of nasal hair trimmers the world has ever known.

Stuck In Holyhead

I was in Holyhead last night, rubbing myself silly in one of my favourite little venues in North Wales, and all was going alarming well until halfway through my act when I began to think about the moral case for privacy.

It was an odd thing, to be sure. There I was, about to put my spuds and sausage on show yet again, but also considering the question of privacy from a rationalist perspective. I doubt if Spinoza could ever have found himself so thong tied, faced with such a strange conflict of interests. But there you go... It was more than enough to disturb a man, I can tell you, and not for one but two reasons.

First of all, it’s not at all like The Chipster to be so unprofessional when he’s snapping elastic for the ladies. I prefer to keep my mind on what I’m doing. But perhaps the crowd was too small for a Friday night or I felt uncomfortable wearing a particularly cheap poker dot thong. Whatever the reason, I soon found myself asking: does our right to privacy really mean that much?

And that’s when the second thing to disturb me came to mind. It was the thought that few people seem to care much about privacy these days, or if they care, they only care about those issues that catch the media headlines. Nobody considers championing those other moments of privacy that this government would so happily take from us.

You might suppose that a man given to taking his clothes off for money wouldn’t value his privacy all that highly but you’d be wrong. Being at home with my body in its natural state, albeit with a slight moistening of baby oil, is precisely what makes me understand what privacy means to us all. I think about it more often than the rest of you. I cherish a little more highly that which I give away so cheaply. Or perhaps its just that mine is one of those minds drawn to metaphysics whenever my thong gets too tight.

It was yesterday’s conviction of the News of the World reporter who tapped the royal phones that made me begin to realise how little we, as individuals, appear to care about our privacy. We hide our most personal telephone recordings behind four digit codes, easily hacked by anybody with the know-how. We install wireless routers in our homes but few of us bother to set up the security and passwords to prevent outsiders from getting access to our private network. We carry camera phones with us wherever we go, taking more and more reality from the private and into a public realm. And we’re so blasé about our right to space or to our private moments in the day that we’d happily submit to a identity card scheme and databases for our DNA.

Yet programmes such as Big Brother make it so evident that it is the little moments in our lives that actually make us all who we are. I'm now watching 'Face' from the A Team brushing his teeth and it's fascinating viewing. These are our simian moments, when we hunch our shoulders and drag our knuckles on the floor. They are the spaces in busy pretension-filled lives when we finally reveal to ourselves who we are, dripping with toothpaste and private doubts.

Privacy is like that. It is a place where we can each hide away the things that aren’t for public consumption. We all have big secrets we fear might be discovered but we also have another side to our private lives which is just as vital. Big Brother performs an important function by showing us a world where we are not allowed to be human without paying a consequence. It reminds us of a world where everybody knows when you’ve rearranged your underwear, picked your nose, or broken wind. It is a world where one person's petty animosity towards another becomes an international incident.

So we might all talk about the high and noble reasons for protecting our privacy. We might scorn those that bug telephones of the rich and famous. But let’s not forget those people who seek to take away our private time, who wish to see us on camera for an increasingly large portion of our lives, who wish to punish us for the petty, uneven, ugly sides to our natures.

Imagine a world when a man is but a scratch of an itching buttock away from public humiliation.

That’s the thought that struck me as I danced tonight in Holyhead.

And then all the ladies screamed with delight.