Opening Discussion

I’ve been lying in my hotel room all day, waiting to catch a taxi to the airport. For this reason, I’ve no great adventures to recount. I’ve done nothing but read the Jules Verne and browse the web. You might say I'm wasting time in one of the world's great capitals but I'm keeping my head down, fearing that an appearance outside might lead me into more trouble with ‘the Washington authorities’.

This seclusion did, however, give me plenty of chance to look at the website that Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn have launched today for their 2020 Vision campaign.

Now, the Chipster wants to make it known that he’s all for the future. He thinks the future will be big next thing. You just can’t ignore it or it will be on us before we know it… Whoops! There you go! Just as I was typing that sentence, a bit of the future was here and I missed it. Well, we’ll just have to be more careful the next time… Damn! Too late… A bit more slipped right through my fingers.

You see how easy it is to get slightly manic about the future? It gets only worse once you realise that the politicians are all for it too. This 2020 webside, for example, is full of happy thoughts about tomorrow and the day after. And is it any wonder when we’re so resolutely marching ‘towards a progressive century’?

To be honest, I don’t actually know what they mean by ‘a progressive century’. It sounds a bit too much like a ‘progressive skin disease’. And what is ‘progressive’ about a century exactly? Is it longer or shorter than a normal century? Does it come in different colours? I don’t know. I’m just a stripper with a large thong collection. Terms like ‘progressive century’ are less meaningful to me than the sound of a well snapped piece of gusset elastic. Yet I know it has to mean something. It has to mean something when the people are spending so much money advertising it. I suppose it’s just up to me to figure out what it means.

They mean, I suppose, that in the future we abandon whatever we’ve been doing in favour of something else. Out with the ‘old thinking’ and in the with new. That sort of thing. We’re still not quite sure what this other thinking we’ll be doing will be, except it will be a damn sight better than the things we’ve been doing so far. In fact, that is probably an example of progressive thinking right there. I feel illuminated just being in its presence.

So, ‘progressive’ means we get rid of all that conservative thought that’s been holding us back for too long. And I’m all for that. After all, what has the power of conservatism ever given us except for a bit of civilisation for the last few centuries? We’d be a damn sight better off with something else and I’m brimming with excitement at the thought of burning everything down before we even begin to think of an alternative. What’s more progressive than a short period of anarchy? The most important thing is to rid ourselves of that horrible conservative thinking. We want radical ideas for a nation where a man can be proud to wear underwear on his head and call himself the Archmage Skinflick the Third.

Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn clearly have a good handle on how we should move forward. This website of theirs already declares that their ‘recent speeches’ are ‘coming soon’, which is how it should be. While we’re looking forward to the future, we can also look forward to the past. Policies are also in the future pipeline but that’s good since too we’ll be giving the old policies well before we think up the new ones. And if you’re getting confused, the whole thing boils down to one line: ‘Politics is about the future not the past’.

Apropos of nothing: I hear that dementia is increasing in the nation at large. That can only be a good thing given that it's all about the future and not the past. Whether we suffer dementia or not, we’ll all soon be living in the future with no though of what’s gone before...

History is history, baby. The Chipster says so.

My Thermal Thong

My fever must be high tonight. I’m lying in bed, watching Question Time, and suffering such violent delusions that I actually believe that David Miliband has just said that Gordon Brown will be as unpopular as Blair in six month’s time.

Old Labour must be spawning again. It could only be ice cracking but I wonder if it’s not the sound of the Labour Party rubbing their dry carcasses together in that ritual of skin shedding that preceded the moment they devour their Queen. And the last person I would have expected to be so perceptive is Miliband. The man resembles a preying mantis in everything including appetite. (Turns out I was right. My ever reliable namesake has got the quote: ‘"I bet in a year's time people will be calling for Tony Blair to come back and people will be booing Gordon Brown.") At least I’m not that delusional.

Back to more serious matters, you might wonder what I’m doing in bed so early. Well, there’s been a bit of snow about. Don’t know if you’ve noticed it. Here in Bangor it’s not been too bad, though my gig was cancelled tonight. I’m not sorry. I would have cancelled it myself. There’s nothing worse for a man of my business than a sudden cold snap, but this is doubly true when I’m coming down with a cold.

The Romanian voicebox rang me up from London and was full of stories of deep snow and being rescued by the men of the AA. She was also streaming with a cold and warning be that there’s something going about. It was not news. This morning I began to notice the first signs of my having caught something. My feet are now cold and I’m aching all over. I also have a sore throat.

No need to worry about me. I’m made of stronger stuff. And I’m also wearing my thermal thong and my fleece pyjamas bought from Millets for Himalayan conditions. Though I am still cold.

So I’ll soon close my laptop and curl up with a good book. The alternative is to put on an old black and white film.

What is no alternative is to write anything more tonight.

So I’ll just wish you all a goodnight.

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.

Singing Profumo On A Bicycle

Some deathly silences this morning. Being exiled by a Romanian is like suffering an excess of wax in your ears. It alters your perceptions of the world. Everything becomes more apparent. Less real. Not that I regretted the silence. My post-Superbowl hangover has only just lifted after an hour spent at the gym where I tried to redeem myself with my body by burning the toxins out of my system.

As I was cycling my way to ten miles, getting nowhere but feeling better for it, I read the newspaper. It helps make the burn seem that much shorter, but unusually this morning, I only had a copy of The Telegraph with me. I found myself in a potentially perilous position. I did the only sensible thing in the circumstances and skipped the usual editorials singing the praises of David Cameron and his veritable ape house of Eton greybacks, jibbering tax monkeys, and Chelsea chimps. I settled on the arts section where I knew I’d be safe. That’s where I first read about this new musical based on the Profumo affair.

It’s called ‘A Modern Girl’ and gets a fairly average review. They note the ‘strange lacunae in this show – no Mandy Rice-Davies, no glimpse of the notorious "man in the mask"’ but conclude by saying that it ‘deserves to take its chance in the West End.’

Being in show business myself (and few cannot deny me the right to feel a special affinity towards that word ‘show’), this kind of revisionism is most welcome. ‘The Sound of Music’ might bring in the crowds, but we must do our best to encourage the original musicals. Yet even to my limited knowledge of musical theatre, I can see how the producers have missed out on a few tricks. I regret the lack of the ‘man in the mask’ more than most as I always like to hear a song where a skilful lyricist is able to find rhymes for ‘Prince’, ‘Greek’, and ‘Edinburgh’.

However, as my calves began to feel the heat of the ninth mile, I began to reflect on how much the Profumo scandal remains in the public mind. It seems to me to be a bit too old to be worth this kind of attention. Audiences want names and faces we recognise.

Which is why I’m proposing ‘John Prescott : The Musical’. Casting to begin shortly. Check press for details. Working title only.

The story, as I see it, begins in the small coastal town of Hull, where a lonely stowaway on a cruise ship decides to pay for his passage by working as a porter. I’m thinking of clever allusions to the high jinx of the Marx Brother’s ‘Monkey Business’ (1931) to begin with, as our working class hero finds himself trapped in a small cabin with men who, how shall we put this politely… ‘like to discuss shoes’.

Alienated from his fellow stewards, John (for that’s our hero’s name) goes out on the desk and sings a beautiful lament for his failing dreams and his discomfort in being around men attracted to his taught muscular body. Just as the song finishes its coda, the lights come up and from out of the water, a giant leviathan appears, clad only in fake leopard-skin. It’s that lovely dryad of the deep, Pauline, who has come to save John from the life he hates! She magics him away from that world and into the world of court intrigue where he soon rises to become the second most powerful man in the land.

I haven’t figured the rest out, but I think if I could find somebody to do the music, I could easily knock some lyrics together. I could also use my contacts in the business of exotic dancing to provide plenty of flesh to keep the punters happy.

I don’t know what you think but a man has to think about the future when his perfect body can no longer absorb baby oil.

And that was the thought I was left with when the exercise bike beeped and told me I’d done my ten miles.

A Stand Up Chipster

I had one of those life-changing moments last night and, oddly, it had nothing to do with my genitals.

For the first time in my life, I had to face a hostile audience; a rare occurrence in the life of a man with a reputation as a fine thonglateer. But I think you’ll understand what I mean when I’ve fully explained the circumstances of my little epiphany.

It was, in all other respects, a normal Monday night. Bangor town centre was simmering away on the gently heat of the packed nightclubs and busy taxi ranks. And there was certainly nothing out of the ordinary when, on the stroke of nine, I arrived at the Green Dragon Tavern, my kitbag packed from base to zip with a world-class selection of thongs.

As normal, I went straight to my changing room behind the stage. It’s there that I like to shower, limber up, and generally get myself centred for my act, which last night I was due to perform at ten.

It’s my custom to leave it until the last minute before I make my way around to the side of the stage, so by the time I got in place, the tavern was in semi darkness. I could dimly make out the crowd, chattering away as I moved to my usual spot, front and centre, where I proceeded to wait the few extra seconds before the spotlight would pick me out and my act would begin.

There’s always a buzz of excitement knowing you’re about to get seriously naked in front of a room of strangers. The adrenaline rush is like no other I know.

Except, it’s never quite as big as the rush you get when you realise that somebody has made one huge mistake.

I was standing there, holding my plumber’s wrench in my hand and balancing an old sink plunger on my head, ready to pout my way to the front of the stage, when the lights suddenly came up. I froze for a moment as I read the sign across the stage floor.

‘Comedy Club’

Instead of finding myself in front of my usual Monday night ladies, I was standing before two hundred sassy comedy lovers of both sexes ready for a night of stand-up.

I think I can be excused if my hand loitered on my zip for a moment longer than normal as I wondering how to get myself out of this embarrassing predicament.

Should I get snapping my thong or should I try to tell some jokes full of gentle observations about our shared social mores? The last time I made a mistake comparable to this one, I chose the wrong option. It had been at a wedding reception and I spent an uncomfortable night in jail until the whole matter was resolved the following morning when the bride’s mother dropped all charges and returned my thong intact.

And that’s why, tonight, I lowered my wrench and walked up to the microphone.

This is a fairly accurate transcript of what I said:

Good evening, Bangor!

[Polite applause]

So…. is there anybody from Wales in the audience tonight?

[Silence]

You… you won’t believe me when I tell you this, but I came out here to take off my clothes.

[A solitary whoop from the crowd]

Hey, I will if you will…

[A lonely cheer]

No, no, honestly. I’m not actually a plumber, if that’s what you were thinking. There wouldn’t be anything funny about my being a plumber, would there now?

[I was oblivious to the fact I was still balancing a sink plunger on my head]

No, I’m a stripper. I take off my clothes for a living. My name’s Chip Dale. You might have heard of me. I’m the Thongoleer Extraordinaire.

[More polite applause from the crowd. They must have indeed heard of me, but then again, who hasn’t?]

Well, it’s a living, I suppose, and it makes things interesting when I fill in my tax forms.

I always like to answer those questions they ask me about my supplemental income. ‘How did you earn this extra money?’ I usually include photographs wrapped in a thong. And ‘How was this money paid?’ I find this one harder to answer. How do I explain how a five pound note was pushed between my buttocks by a nurse in Wrexham high on Bacardi?

But the great thing about being a stripper is you get to have some really useful things lying around the house. I have all the plumbing equipment, which always comes in handy when there’s a leak. I’m can’t say I’m much use with a monkey wrench but I can do naked cartwheels while my girlfriend changes washers.

Well, now I’m here, I might as well talk about something that’s been bothering me for a while.

Do you ever wonder how we ended up with this government?

[Loud whoop…]

I know I didn’t vote for them. Which means it had to be one of you…

[Slightly guilty sniggering]

Okay, own up. What possessed you to put a cross next to the name of people that go about invading places? I don’t even put a cross next to those boxes on supermarket questionaries that ask me if I want to be entered into their prize draw. And invading places has to be a whole league bigger than winning a year’s free groceries.

Now we’ve got a Labour government, I’m not going to be like everybody else accusing them for invading our privacy. You don’t know if they’re listening…

And I wouldn’t say they’re corrupt, though I did see Gibraltar on eBay the other night.

And they’re so odd looking… It’s like all government posts were filled on a first come first served arrangement with the local job centre. If Gordon Brown hadn’t taken charge of the nation’s purse, he’d be the new caretaker down the town baths. Not so many warnings about an extra two pee in stealth taxes but extra warnings about stealth peeing in the deep end.

And what can I say about John Prescott? You know at school there was always a slow kid in the class? Teachers always made them milk monitor and they always won the awards at the end of the year for best kept locker? Doesn’t that explain why we have a Deputy Prime Minister? ‘Okay, John, could you collect the glasses now the cabinet meeting has finished? No John, put that away. Nice little boys don’t try to sharpen those like a pencil… John, please take you hand from up my skirt. No, it’s not a tent.’

Of course, I’m a Liberal Democrat myself.

[Laughter! The first of the evening!]

I get to take part in political debates yet I can never be held accountable for anything that ever happens. The only thing I worry about is a well hung parliament. We Lib Dems aren’t used to having real power. I worry it will go to our heads and we’ll make crazy demands. Menzies Campbell is already talking of asking for a rerun of the 1964 two hundred meters final.

Okay, I’m getting the signal that I’ve got to stop. I have people to go and flash. You’ve been a wonderful audience. My name’s Chip Dale.

Good night.

[Polite applause]

And with that, I made my way back to my dressing room where I changed back into my normal everyday suit and thong.

When I got home, Gabby greeted me at the door and was soon screeching with delight at my story. Only at the end did she confess that she forgotten to pass on a message about the cancellation of my act because of a comedy evening.

I couldn’t be angry with the poor poppet. Tonight has taught The Chipster a valuable lesson and I’ll never look on my plumber’s outfit the same. It’s a memory of the night when I realised that stripping is one of the easier art forms and that I should stick to what I’m good at.

I’ve been Chip Dale. You’ve been a wonderful audience.

Good night.

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.

A Reaffirmation

My god! The Chipster nearly bust a thong when he heard that John Reid has said that the sentencing guidelines were ‘reaffirmed’ and ‘not changed’.

So what is he effectively saying? Not that the government have just started to let paedophiles out of prison but they’ve been doing it for years and, just in case anybody had forgotten that this is the government policy, they’ve just given everybody a heads up.

Tonight I’m going off to Holyhead where I’ll doing my prison warder routine. I let everything out…

Just thought I better ‘reaffirm’ that point.

Afghan Opium

My thong must be prophetic. This morning I posted a story about my horse tablets and then the Chipster spots this report in the Telegraph.

Doctors are suggesting we use the Afghan poppy harvest to produce painkillers for the NHS. Sounds like a very reasonable idea. What’s the point in invading a country unless you grab its best resources? And to be honest, from where this thong is sitting, we’ve had nothing out of Afghanistan. Where are all the camels we were promised if we liberated them from the Taliban? A bit of opium has to be worth all the pain, sacrifice, and trouble.

It seems to me that the government don’t know how to negotiate. When I’m on stage and a lovely lady pushes five pounds down my trunks, I don’t immediately whip them off for her gratification. I tell her that for five pounds the Thongmaster will only gyrate his slick hips for her. We’re talking serious cash for the ‘full liberation’ and the government should adopt the same policy. For the UK to give Afghanistan the Full Monty, they should hand over their whole poppy harvest and a fleet of camels. Anything less than that is an insult to Britain and hardly made it worth our getting oiled up.

The King of Thong’s Medication

Ever since I came a cropper beneath nineteen stones of a falling traffic warden that night at the Turntable Taffy's Disco in Llandudno, the Chipster has been taking some pretty strong medication to keep the pain at bay. I’ve known injuries like this to end some dancer’s careers but no matter how much you say you won’t be egged into doing something stupid, the plummeting punter is still one of great hazards of the professional stripping circuit.

Consider the situation: a room full of excitable ladies, heavily influenced in their behaviour by all the neat paraffin they’ve been necking all evening. Throw in The Chipster, oiled to his best sheen and wearing only a black leather thong. Well, you can’t stop the ladies asking you to pick them up and hold them to be lifted above your head, can you? And you know the Big DC: I can’t let a lady down, can I? Heart as big as… Well, enough of that.

The tablets I take are big enough for horses. Seriously. The surgeon who operated and fixed my back told me that they use the same medication to dope race horses and it’s that level of professionalism which makes me feel so bloody of the NHS. I might be doped up to my bloodshot eyes but I know a good thing when I see one. And the NHS is most definitely a good thing despite all of Tony Blair's tinkering.

Just the other day, we were doing some step aerobics when Gabby went over on her ankle and I had to take her to A&E. They had her bandaged up in no time. Very sweet about it to and I knew the nurse from some of the local Lib Dems meetings. But do you want to know what was really great? While I was there I came up with a brand new routine I hope to try out this week. You have to picture the darkened nightclub, packed with punters. I’ll come on stage, single spot picking me out dressed in a white coat and carrying a clip board. I come centre stage and say to the audience ‘Pass me the tongues, matron!’ Then I pause. Look to audience and add: ‘Did somebody mention thong?’ Then I whip out my old fella. Bloody instant classic act. And all down to the NHS.