While I get my mind together over a cup of coffee, here's the official Chip Dale For Leader desktop. Send it to all Lib Dems you know, install in on every computer you can, and we'll see if we can get my leadership campaign off to a flying start. With the right organisation, some tasteful thong sponsorship, and a prevailing wind, I might yet win this.
‘And when he pulled it out, it had butter on it.’
It might not mean much to you but I think it’s the funniest line I’ve written so far.
Another day typing up my novel and a thousand words to the cause. A thousand buttery words at that. This novel is becoming something quite special, though I worry about revealing too many of my professional secrets. And do people really want to know what a professional stripper uses to clean his thong? Should I really describe how I was introduced to stripping by a ex-Lib Dem councillor’s secretary who caught me eating a mutton sandwich in her stock cupboard?
I await expert opinion on these matters but, for the time being, I’m pressing on with my first draft. I expect it to be ready for the end of Summer.
Speaking of literature, in today’s FE lesson we read ‘King Lear’, which Mrs. Rust insists in one of the better plays. I couldn’t understand a word of it but I enjoyed the chance to shout loudly in rhyme. Should you be wondering: I was Lear. Probably the first thonged Lear in the history of the play.
Alongside all this hard work, I’ve been indulging myself by watching the football. I’m more of a football fan than I am the rugby, which again goes to prove that a man with English genes can’t ignore the game of his forefathers. I was looking forward to the all English final, though now I’ll swing my heavily loaded thong behind Liverpool. As with stripping, effort means more than ability so it was reassuring to see the big guys lose for a change.
Tomorrow I’ll be back at the coffee shop early, another session in the dance studio, before I spend the evening watching the election results come in. I’ve grown a little disillusioned with the whole business of politics in the last few months. I think it’s when the Lib Dems refused to consider my proposals to ban thong use for anybody under the age of 21. A poorly fitting thong leads to sub-standard thong experience and it really takes a mature outlook on life to truly experience what a thong means. Which, coincidentally, is Mrs. Rust’s attitude to Shakespeare. Or as she told me: ‘Shakespeare and thongs; thongs, Shakespeare – that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
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.
People are already coming up to me in the street and asking: Chippy, are you really just a one trick pony? And I have to tell them: yes, yes, I think I probably am only a one trick pony. My trick is to make ladies swoon and what a trick it is! And as for the bit about being like a pony, we’ll there are things that bless those of us born with the Dale genes…
But I think I see what you’re all getting around to wondering is whether Chip Dale will be a success in the world of blogging. What makes him tick? What’s his opinion on the big issues of the day? When will he be launching his own TV channel covering Westminster politics but from a nude angle? Well, all this will come in time. Funding has to be put in place. Baby oil ordered in bulk. Negotiations are already under way to bring Donal Blaney from 18 Doughty Street to my little studio above the ladies' hairdressers in Bangor. We’ll see what we can do. Watch this space…
Regarding the big issues of the day, I think you’ll find that I’m a man with strong opinions on most things. Take Iraq, for instance. You should know that The Chipster hates the idea of war. He’s a thongmonger not a warmonger. But he’s no quitter either, even if it does mean not living up to his Lib Dem roots. I watched the State of the Union last night and I found myself thinking about how the problems of Iraq resembles the life of the nightclub slick hipster. Many has been the time I’ve looked on a room full of drunk beauticians from Rhyl and thought to myself: I really don’t fancy getting naked in front of them! But what choice did I have? To run away would have made things much worse. Bangor or Baghdad: withdrawal might easily spark civil war.
‘But Chip,’ I head you cry, ‘can a Welsh stripper really support the idea of our keeping forces in Iraq?’ Well, I’ll tell you. Exotic dancing has taught me many things and the greatest is the lesson of ‘containment’. Keep everything in its own pouch and you can be sure things will be okay. There’s no use letting our forces go flopping about all over the place! It’s no good for anybody. The situation in Iraq may be bad at the moment, but to withdraw troops would leave those poor people to face even greater problems in the long term. That is not The Chipster’s way.
I was talking to my FRIEND, Iain Dale, just the other day, asking him if he thought I used the word ‘thong’ too much in my everyday speech. Iain paused a moment and said, as quick as a flash because he's smart like that, that he thought… Oh, well, perhaps I shouldn’t tell tales of FRIENDS. You know… those people who don’t intend to sue a man for every thong he owns.
You can tell that the Chipster is in fine fettle this morning and Bangor has never looked more lovely. I’m sitting typing in nothing but my favourite pair of T Backs while Gabby’s gone off to London to buy herself a new voice box. She’s so precious but what else could I do for my little Romanian petal? I'm being a bit too generous, perhaps, but freedom feels so bloody good when you know you won’t have to flee to Romania chased by the Tory blogosphere.
Many thanks for the many emails of support I’ve received. It took me all of five minutes responding to both of them last night. It’s good to know that there are so many secret thong wearers out there. The Chipster has had to enable comment moderation though. It’s my blog and it’s my right to delete comments when they don’t fit with my policy. If you want to talk about underpants, jockey shorts, or god forbid, boxers, then go elsewhere. I recommend Bloggerheads or Guido. And if you could all see some sense and vote Lib Dem, then the Chipster would be most grateful. Remember: it’s the only party with truly progressive policies such as free body oil on the NHS.
Now that I feel reborn, I know I should say something about contemporary politics and the heady world of Westminster. Unfortunately, the batteries running low on my laptop and I’ve still to read the morning papers.
More later, my string gusseted brethren.
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.
