Changing Perspectives

Don’t expect to see much activity on the live Chip Dale monitor today. The subdermal tracking device has been setting off car alarms all morning so I’m restricted to the flat until Gabby can contact her supplier in the Romanian government and find out how to jam the frequency. The confinement has given me time to reflect on the exciting times I shared with Trixy. How we laughed when I got my thong caught in the heel of her shoe as we fled Bangor through the back gardens of Holyhead Road! I also think that marriage has left me a changed man. And I don’t just mean in the sense of my now being the biggest emitter of radio waves in the North Wales region.

The thought came to me this morning as I found myself browsing the increasingly troubled musings of Richard Madeley. The man has a monster of an ego but I think he occasionally serves a purpose. This morning, that purpose was in directing my attention to Why That’s Delightful, the comprehensively mad blog by Graham Lineham, who will be forever blessed (perhaps even cursed) as being known as one of the writers of ‘Father Ted’. The latest post is a gem and goes down as one of my favourite YouTube finds.

Harlan Ellison has written many science-fiction short stories, books for teenagers, and TV shows, though I can’t, honestly, ever recollect reading anything of his. His rant touches upon one of the truths of modern life as a writer, and indeed, as a blogger. I’ve often been contacted by people in the media asking me to do something for them, whether it’s give an interview or write a brief snippet for something they’re doing. What’s striking is that, every time, they don’t mention money.

‘Hi Chip,’ begins an email. ‘Would you give us a quote about your life as a top stripper in Wales?’

Or the phone will go. ‘Chip. We loved the thing you wrote about pineapple chunks and the guide dog. Could we reprint it in our next magazine?’

At other times, I’ve seen my wisdom crop up in newspapers, quoted in full, with the barest indication as to who said it. I’ve even seen my pictures used in the media without my permission. Blogging is the problem. The media treats us as though we’re easy filler for their papers, shows, websites. Many of us produce quality content for no money. It's insane!

Since I opened this blog in January, I’ve written 345 posts. If each post is, on average, 500 words long, then that would make this blog 122,000 words long, or as big as a thickish novel. Actually, many of my posts are more like 1000-2000 words long (some even longer) and the total word count for this blog is actually over 180,000 words. The point is, I’ve not earned a penny from all this effort. That’s like my having written two comic novels in the last year – or what Jeremy Clarkson or Billy Bryson write between them. Perhaps you could argue that there’s still fewer laughs. I’d hope there have been more. What would a serious bad writer expect to profit from a novel? A thousand pounds? Two thousand? I don't know but this blog has earned me $9.88 from Google ads. So that's 180,000 words written for $9.88, or about 0.002 pence per word.

So I gave a loud cheer when I heard Harlan Ellison’s rant. I've listened to it ten times now and it makes me smile and cry in about equal measure because there’s a degree of self-recognition there too. If I ever want to consider myself a professional writer, perhaps I should give up blogging. Why should I write for nothing other than my own amusement? As much as I enjoy writing about my adventures, isn’t it just foolish to do it for nothing? I’d ask anybody reading this the same question that Harlan Ellison asked the woman who rang him up: would you work for nothing? And isn’t this a failure of blogs? Doesn’t it make writing look easy? Doesn’t it devalue the very thing that so many of us are trying to accomplish?

[Update: The video is from a documentary about Ellison called 'Dreams With Sharp Teeth', which has leapt to the top of the list of things I want to see. The great thing about books is that you can go years believing you've read all the writers who deserve to be read yet I now find myself browsing Amazon for an apparently significant writer I hadn't heard of before today. And the man seems to be my kind of madman. He sits at his typewriter wearing silly hats, for Christsake! That almost beats writing in a thong.]

A New Enterprise

At last, some good news about The Chipster! I’ve found a new source of income. You might know about the trouble I’ve been having lately. Since the EU introduced new regulations on thong usage, the exotic dancing isn’t paying like it used to and I’ve been keeping an eye out for alternative means of supporting a Romanian and her twenty seven chickens. Now, the search is over. Two nights ago I was offered a tempting proposition.

I'd just finished doing a routine in the Shangri-La when a guy I knew from the old days came up to me and complimented me on my physique.

‘You’re looking great, Chip. Been working out?’

‘Every day,’ I said, causally flexing a bicep.

He nodded thoughtfully as he smashed a bottle of lager across my head. When I didn’t flinch, he seemed to take that as a good sign. Of what, I wasn’t quite sure.

‘You have thick skin,’ he said.

I said that I hadn’t noticed.

‘I could do with a man of your unique qualities, Chip. You’re strong like a lion, lithe like an eel, and you don’t cut easily.’

‘Like a Tesco chease and onion pastie?’ I quipped.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Want to earn some money? I mean serious cash?’

I didn’t need asking twice.

‘Well come to this address at nine o’clock tonight,’ he said, scribbling a number of a house near the Bangor docks down on the back of a beer mat. ‘You might want to bring somebody to help you. Preferably somebody with a gentle touch and some medical training.’

I had just the person sitting at home, writing obsessive letters of complaint to the Guinness Book of Records about their unwillingness to consider world records involving razor sharp knives. I told Gabby about the chance of work and she was excited and agreed to help. Not only does she pride herself on her gentility but she’s had five years of medical training at the Romanian territorial commando school.

‘It good Chip get job,’ she said, as we left the flat at eight thirty. ‘You be able to buy car like you want. Perhaps get Mini.’

The thought did excite me. I don’t own a car and the fact that I have to walk or cycle everywhere is good for the heart but less impressive when it comes to my employability. Thoughts of money, success and a larger carbon footprint ensured that I was buzzing by the time we reached the old warehouse. The harbour was silent except for a few drunken merchantmen coming up from a Russian trawler moored by the warehouse.

At the warehouse, we were met by two bulky guys standing guard at the door. One checked my name on a list before the other led us inside and through to an office at the back where my old friend met me.

‘Chip! So glad you could come. People were excited when I mentioned your name.’

‘What’s the gig?’ I asked. ‘Some kind of stripping, I assume?’

‘Stripping? No. Not unless you prefer to fight naked.’

‘Fight?’

‘The game’s bare-knuckle fighting,’ he said. ‘No gouging, no punching below the belt, and no elbows. Other than that, you can do what you want.’

‘I won’t let you do this,’ said Gabby. ‘You must protect your looks, Chippy. Let me fight instead.’

Perhaps I’ve been watching too many John Wayne films lately but I couldn’t let Gabby fight my battles. As for my looks, I had enough confidence in my fighting skills to know I couldn’t get too hurt.

I stripped down to my thong and emerged in a warehouse full of punters. It was there that I met my opponent: a Russian sailor, six three, and probably seventeen stone. He had a scar like a sickle running down his face and into his bottom lip. His name was Sergei and a tattoo on his arm boasted that he’d taken the lives of ten men in the ring and at least two dozen more outside.

I won’t deny that the first three rounds were painful. I’ve not fought in years. I studied the martial arts back when I was a rather wayward teenager. It’s to my shame that I was once considered the best street fighter in Bangor. That’s before I discovered dance and changed to the ways of the thong. This, however, was different. There was money at stake and the continued happiness of a Romanian pop star and her feathered companions.

I held in there, my guts making up for my ring rustiness. Gabby gave me good advice but my reflexes were too slow, honed to the drunken mauling of overweight legal secretaries on a pub crawl. Not ex-Soviet merchant marines with a perchance for headbutting.

About the fourth round, I began to regain my edge. I’d cut the Russian over his eye and I was bruised but fine; my friend's observation about the thickness of my skin proving a good one. A few jabs set up my right hook which lifted the Russian off his feet and set back Glasnost by a decade. The fight was over and the cries of ‘Chipster’ rang around the old warehouse.

I’m fighting again on Sunday when I’ll be up against the Welsh gypsy bare knuckle champion. You’re all invited but the location is still a secret. I’ll try to email you with details sometime on Saturday, so those of you who can make it, I’d welcome your support.

A Bitter Stripper

I stayed up late last night writing a post I didn’t have chance to finish because the spin cycle on the washing machine came to a premature end and I had to go hang out my thongs to dry. I was intending to finish writing it today but changed my mind after reading the papers.

My thongs are now dry but, unfortunately, I’ve decided to give up blogging.

I’ll probably have a change of heart tomorrow but at the moment The Chipster is feeling very bitter and down. I’m planning on selling off my collection of thongs and getting a proper job. I don’t want to be part of Bangor’s entertainment industry any more. I don’t want to be Welsh. I don’t want to be a man. And I don’t want to be single.

That’s right. I want to be a wife in the north! I want to write about my infirm mother and the things she can do with her false teeth when my father’s standing with his trousers around his ankles flogging her with his belt. I want to write about the whimsical things my dog tells me and the things my children do to beggars they meet on the streets. I want to write long meandering sentences full of apple pie metaphors and smudged similies like finger painted smiles and clowns’ eyebrows.

But, Chipster, I hear you ask, if you want to do that, then why give up blogging?

Well, there comes a point in your life when you think ‘why bother’. Why risk serious pelvic injury every night to dance for audiences who forget you the next day? What’s the point in writing to amuse your readership? What is the point in trying to do something different to the ten million other blogs out there?

Today’s Sunday Times front page had the story I’ve been expecting for weeks. It’s the announcement that ‘The Wife in the North’ has just landed a 70,000 pound publishing deal to turn her blog into a novel.

I wish her well, of course, but I dislike the pretence that this was always just an ordinary woman who decided to start a blog. It’s one of those blogging success stories we all hope will happen to us. Except they don’t happen to us. They don’t happen to ordinary bloggers. They don’t happen to male strippers from Wales. They happen to ex-education journalists from the Sunday Times.

Yet here I am, a real man in a really grim northern (well, the north of Wales) town, stripping for a living, yet nobody wants to hear about the reality of my life ‘up here’.

The Chipster is feeling bitter today and even knowing that he owns Wales’ biggest collection of posing pouches can’t make him feel happy.

UPDATE: Bryan Appleyard has written a wondefully playful piece which just about captures The Chipster’s sentiments. I guess if I’m not the only one thinking this, I’ll be back in my thongs tomorrow.