Chip Dale's A Tart

Okay, I’m going to be a tart again and have a good moan. But does my bloody bad luck never end?

This horrible cold is finally settling into congestion and sinus headaches and has taught me never to have coffee with an old friend who works in an infant school. I swear those teachers are immune to the germs that just leap for the first man that they see wearing a thong. It’s my second bad cold of the year and, despite what you’ve probably heard, there’s nothing attractive about the sight of a wheezing Chipster dripping with mucus as he straddles a bridesmaid on a hen night.

Being ill has, however,allowed me to read and enjoyed 300 pages of the new Harry Potter. Only, Amazon displayed their usual brilliance by sending me another damaged copy, no doubt packed my some ungrateful 15 year old, having their first experience of a job in the big bad world. Last time, my edition was missing 100 pages and I had to rush to the shops to get myself a second. This time, the cover was folded back and ripped.

As to the book itself: it’s more of the same and I won’t spoil it for you. It just reminds me that effortless story telling makes you feel like the thing writes itself. Potter just feels effortless and it just goes to show what memorable (though two dimensional) characters do to a story. It also reminds me how much I enjoy reading and have made a promise to myself to go through my book shelves and fill in all the gaps in my learning.

That’s if I don’t quit my life as a stripper and go and get myself a proper day job…

You see, the problems with my PC continue to get bigger by the day.

This is an appeal to anybody who understands this stuff: I just can’t install Windows XP on my PC. It has three SATA drives, which means that the XP installer won’t recognise them without preloading the right drivers from floppy disk. After days spent searching for a floppy disk that still works (I haven’t used them in years) I managed to load the drivers, only for the PC to tell me that it still can’t see my hard drives.

It’s getting insufferable and I know my work will begin to suffer on Monday. I rarely blog from my laptop and do most of my writing at the PC. The laptop is for revising, where I can be more relaxed and hidden away from the distractions of all Romanians. But I guess I’ll have to get used rewriting to the sounds of chickens being plucked and peasant songs being sung. The alternative is to go out and spend £200 on a copy of Windows Vista. Only, I don’t have £200 to spend on Vista, which itself, makes me wonder what kind of man devotes himself to the noble art of the strip whilst remaining so broke?

Depressing thoughts.

Before I start appealing for anybody who knows any good jobs going in the Bangor area, I’m going to finish the Harry Potter. It might make me change my mind. And I’m also hoping it will cheer me up with a suitably happy ending…

Hungarian Goat Knickers

The bad weather finally broke today and I made the most of an unseasonable dry spell by spending the afternoon walking around Bangor with Gabby. I now wish I’d stayed indoors.

It was Gabby’s suggestion that we go clothes shopping on a Sunday. I agreed but only to placate the poor girl. She’d been left feeling pretty low on account of her favourite rooster meeting an unfortunate end in the blades of the strimmer Gabby had been using to clear weeds around her allotment shed. She’d appeared at the flat, this morning, looking like a survivor from an explosion at a pillow factory. The were so many feathers and pieces of meat stuck to her I didn’t know whether to stuff a mattress or fire up the barbecue.

By the time we hit town, Gabby’s mood had turned the proverbial corner with a squeal of smoking tires. Spending money always seems to cheer her up. She became particularly excited once we hit Debenhams’ lingerie department.

‘Ha ha!’ she cried, emerging triumphant from a rack of super-elasticated garters. ‘Look here, Chip! Look at what Gabby find! Goat knickers!’

Gabby has been going on about buying herself a pair of Hungarian-style goat knickers for so long that I’d begun to believe my own argument that they simply didn’t exist. I didn’t want them to exist. They are a pariah among underwear, the antithesis to the thong. They were, in short, the anti-thong.

When Gabby started waving a pair above her head, I knew that all my fears would be realised.

For those of you uninformed about such things, they were the largest pair of knickers I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. They were a grey pair of heavily ribbed pants with a large beard of coarse white hair hanging from the crotch; hence the name, goat knickers. Apparently, they are popular in colder countries where women wear dresses but still like to keep something warm against their inner thighs.

‘Chippy promised if I ever find goat knickers, he buy them,’ she said, thrusting the pants into my hands. ‘So, you go buy. Go buy me goat knickers.’ And with that she disappeared into a wall of strapless bras.

At this point, a lesser man might have gone running from the shop. I could have had the locks to the apartment changed before Gabby got home. But you must know by now that the woman has more ways of breaking into an apartment than the SAS. My options were limited to queuing up at the counter and putting the knickers on my credit card.

I was third in the queue, wondering how I was going to explain to the assistant what a thong-wearing man would want with goat knickers, when I heard a voice I recognised.

‘Chip Dale? Is that you?’

I turned around and found myself looking at one of my old girlfriends.

‘Sha?’

Sha smiled and embraced me a hug before stepping back.

‘You’re looking well,’ I said, admiring the figure that has captivated many a man. She was indeed stunning, wearing a figure-hugging vest over a tight pair of black jeans. High black boots and bandana completed the look and set off the stunning flame of her red bobbed hair.

‘What are you doing here, Chip?’ she asked.

‘Shopping for clothes,’ I said, a bit naive but true nevertheless.

She looked at the goat knickers in my hands.

‘Hungarian goat knickers,’ I explained. ‘Very good for chilly weather.’

‘I see you’ve not changed,’ she smiled. ‘Heck, Chip! I can’t believe it. And you’re looking so good.’ And again, she came to embrace me, only this time planting a kiss of my cheek.

I was about to do the same in return but there was a sudden rustling from a pile of discounted girdles nearby. Before I could react, something shot out, snatched Sha from my arms, and went sliding across the floor in a tangled mess of arms and flailing lacy support bras.

Sha screamed and Gabby whooped in victory.

‘Stop it Gabby!’ I cried, trying to drag her off my friend. ‘It’s okay.’

‘Chip have affair. Chip kissing woman!’ shouted Gabby, using a padded coat hanger to keep me back.

‘She didn’t mean anything by it,’ I tried to explain. ‘It’s nothing like that.’

‘Who is she?’ screamed Sha, trying vainly to pull her arms from beneath Gabby’s knees.

‘Don’t worry, she’s just confused. This is Gabby. She’d my girlfriend. She’s had a traumatic day. She killed her favourite chicken with a garden strimmer.’

I don’t know why but this bit of news only seemed to make matters worse.

‘Get her off me. Please get her off me,’ whimpered Sha, now sounding very frightened.

‘I get off you,’ said Gabby and jumped up to face me. ‘But you, Chippy Dale, you've done it now! Gabby go home and you don’t come with me!’

‘What do you mean? You don’t really think I…’

‘I think you bad man,’ snapped my Romanian harbinger of vengeance. ‘I think you have away with this woman. You make kissing and cuddling in shop while Gabby away. You think I don’t see.’

‘That’s a lie,’ I cried but Gabby had gone, disappearing behind a display of elasticated stockings.

It’s now two hours later and I’m sitting writing this in the local Costa coffee shop. A pair of goat knickers sit beside me and a hot cup of steaming brew of freshly ground stands next to the laptop I found dumped outside the door to my apartment. I’d gone there hoping to talk some sense into Gabby but she’s not answering the door and the loud braying of the Romanian national anthem drowned out my appeals. Sha offered to let me stay at her place but I think that would only make matters worse. When I’ve finished this coffee, I’ll go and try to find a hotel room for the night.

And in case you might be wondering: it’s raining again.

Knife Games and Flaming Kittens

The reporter from The Times didn’t seem to understand my point.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I told the woman who sat poised over her notebook like some vulture with a ball point, ‘but it’s got nothing to do with stripping.’

‘Hasn’t it?’ she asked. ‘But the title…’

‘The title was a joke. You know… A funny acronym. T.E.S.T.I.C.L.E… It’s crude yet witty.’

She pursed her lips. ‘Are acronyms witty? I think our readers might disagree.’

‘Not in this case!’ I snapped and quickly sank my teeth into my knuckles before I could do some real verbal damage. ‘Look. It’s simple. You need to just go and ask Mr. Appleyard about his problem with Blogger. He’ll tell you all you need to know and then you can keep me out of it.’

‘But didn’t you say you’d be protesting? You said there would be clowns burning kittens. My editor only told me to come here because of the kittens.’

‘Yes, well, the kittens are out,’ I said sourly. ‘I had emails from animals rights activists. We had a frank exchange of opinions.’ Actually, they had also taken grave offense at my remarks about monkeys and beagles, though to be fair to them, they had a point about a man juggling live kittens doused in petrol. Promises I'd made to Internet Ronin about flaming fur had probably been a novelty too far.

‘I see,’ said the reporter, noting something down in shorthand.

I felt uncomfortable. The interview wasn’t going at all well, and I felt a bit relieved when Gabby came in with a tray. My heart skipped a beat when I noticed that a bottle of potato gin and a bread knife were alongside the plate of custard creams, the cup of tea, and my own freshly brewed coffee.

‘Are we happy?’ smiled Gabby.

‘We soon will be,’ I muttered, looking at the bottle of gin.

‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said the reporter. ‘You make you own wine.’

Gabby beamed. I frowned. The reporter looked puzzled.

Half an hour later, I was still frowning only I was now speaking on the telephone.

‘She’s out on the ledge,’ I said.

‘But is it a matter of life or death, sir?’ asked the emergency services operator. ‘If not, then you shouldn’t be calling 999.’

‘Somebody might die,’ I promised him. ‘I have a reporter from a national newspaper standing seventy feet above a courtyard and threatening to jump when a story still needs writing about the technical difficulties plaguing one of the country’s top blogs.’

‘I still don’t see what that has to do with the fire brigade,’ said the man. ‘What’s your blog called?’

‘Chip Dale’s Diary,’ I said.

‘And what’s it about?’

‘It’s about me. Chip Dale. It’s my diary.’

‘I see. And you have a problem with it?’

‘No, not at all,’ I answered. ‘In fact, it’s looking pretty damn good. I’ve just it redesigned with a picture of my be-thonged rear.’

The line went dead.

Gabby climbed back in from the ledge. ‘She still says she won’t come in,’ she said and brushed hair from her eyes. The blood had stopped pumping from the back of her hand.

‘Why did you have to get her drunk?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t you see she liked the stuff too much?’

‘So, she like wine. I like wine too.’

‘Potato gin is hardly wine,’ I reminded her. ‘And I still don’t see why you had to start playing a knife game with her.’

A scream cut across the conversation and I ran to the window.

The reporter was staring wide eyed at the forecourt below. It was an improvement. Moments earlier she’d been in a trance and convinced that losing the knife game with Gabby meant she had to jump.

‘What am I doing up here?’ she asked, her face a mask of fear.

‘I think she’s sobering up,’ I told Gabby. ‘Don’t worry,’ I shouted to the reporter. ‘Just ease yourself this way and I’ll grab you.’

Surprisingly, she followed my instructions. The last of the gin in her system appeared to give her a little confidence.

‘There you go,’ I said as our hands locked together and I eased the poor woman back into the flat. ‘Now, that’s not so bad is it?’

‘Who am I?’ she asked, disorientated and looking around the room. I was not surprised. Mild amnesia is a common symptom of drinking Gabby’s spirits. But at least the woman’s face was returning to its natural shade of pink and she appeared to be making a quick recovery from her ordeal.

‘You’re a reporter from The Times,’ I said.

She nodded and smiled.

‘I think I remember,’ she answered. ‘And where am I?’

‘You’re in Wales.’

The woman just went white. I handed her the bottle.

My First Reviewer

I thought it time to give you what all the best Sunday supplements would call ‘a sneak peak’ of the Chipster’s novel. It’s now 74,000 words or 341 pages as my word processor counts them. I’d tell you more but I’m afraid of what you might say.

Gabby curled up on the sofa last night with the first two chapters on her lap. I hate waiting to hear what somebody makes of my work. I paced before the fireplace, nervously fingering my thong, waiting for the first chuckle, the first hint that my manuscript might have a place in the world.

I waited forty three minutes before she made a noise. Even then, it wasn’t remotely like a laugh.

‘Chippy,’ she drawled. ‘I thought you say this comedy.’

Well, the Romanians may have had a barbaric history but surely they’ve never been as cruel.

‘It is a comedy!’ I gasped once my sobs and tears came back under control. ‘I worked hard with every line, spent months making it pleasing to the ear and well suited to the funny bone. Every single page has been rewritten a dozen times, honing it so that not a syllable sits out of place.’

‘Yes,’ she said, in that slightly patronising way she has when she finds she has the upper hand, ‘but you forget to include jokes.’

‘They’re there!’ I exclaimed. ‘There on the page. Every single line has either a guffaw or a chuckle guaranteed. There’s not a line without something to bring the wry smile to your lips.’

‘No, no,’ she said, flicking to the first page. ‘I tell you how to fix. You take this line of page 1.’

She cleared her throat and read out the opening I’d laboured hard to get just right.

Here, in the forgotten backwoods of darkest Bangor, I’m ensconced in the pungency of some Vicks VapoRub and a stewing peppermint tea; saying goodbye to a winter cold almost as if I’m saying goodbye to winter herself. Yet I’m also sitting here, amongst the coughs, sneezes, and Boots decongestants, wondering how Wales could have gone so very wrong of late.

‘This example,’ she said, ‘of where you need good joke about farmer and his pig.’

I could say nothing. She picked up a pen from the jar I keep on the coffee table and she set to work. Two minutes later she set it aside and examined the scribble that had all but obliterated my original prose.

‘There,’ she said. ‘Now let us see if this better.’

Here, in Bangor, farmer says to pig. 'Matilda, I very poor so I have to kill you for meat.' Pig looks at farmer. Farmer says. 'I know you don’t want to die but such is life'. He gets big knife and cuts pig’s throat and chops piggy up for meat. Farmer takes meat to market but nobody buys meat. He says: 'Why not you want to buy my pig meat?' People say to him: “Would you buy from man who would cut a poor piggy’s throat?'

I sat there disturbed in so many ways they were fighting for attention as Gabby rolled on the sofa, holding her stomach as laughter strained her every muscle.

‘Oh! So, so funny!’ she gasped, wiping away tear after tear. ‘What you say Chippy? Isn’t that funnier than all those words. Get down to say who man is and what man wants.’

Back in my office, I spent no more than ten minutes crying, wondering if I truly understand the world. A thong is a simple thing and you can hardly go wrong with one. If only the same were true of words.

The Chipster’s Film Review: Rambo – First Blood Part 2

‘But Chippy!' exclaimed the second Romanian in the room. 'Monica is our guest!’

And just like that, it was decided.

Back to the DVD shelf went the copy of Fellini’s 8 1/2 I thought I’d watch this weekend and into the player went Monica’s favourite film which she’d thoughtfully brought with her. I’m not saying that the Fellini would have made for a more enjoyable evening -- it probably wouldn't -- I’m just saying that I didn’t expect to be watching Rambo: First Blood Part 2.

Now if that makes me sound elitist, you must know me well enough by now to see there’s not a thong of truth in it. The Chipster has always said that the original First Blood is an excellent B movie, always sure to surprise you. It’s not what you expect: subdued for the first half, troubled, and not undone By grotesquely cartoon characters. Brian Dennehy adds some gravity to the whole thing and then there’s the fantastic use of location. On a rainy evening after a bad day, there are few better films to watch with a drink and a bag of quips.

Its sequel, however, is something else. It has more testosterone in it than the whole of the Ukrainian women’s weightlifting team and is about as subtle.

The problem is the plot, which if you want me to sum it up for you, amounts to this:

man finds a reason to take off his vest.

It’s a controversial view of the film but, if you’ll spare me a minute or two of your time, I’ll try to explain but, described pictorially, it would go something like this:

We begin in a quarry where John Rambo is hitting rocks with a large hammer. Why he doesn’t use his head is never satisfactorily explained before his old colonel from his ‘special ops’ days turns up and promises him a presidential pardon if he will go back into Vietnam and help locate missing POWs. We cut quickly to the Far East where Rambo arrives wearing a fleecy shirt of the type well loved by body builders. His sleeves are professionally rolled (top picture, above) and he’s clearly overdressed for the climate. This provides a wonderful bit of foreshadowing of what will come as Rambo spends the scene sweating like an overworked bicep. We can sense in Stallone’s performance that here is a man who needs, beyond all things, to disrobe and get down to his vest.

He next appears wearing some cooler black cottons for a parachute drop in the middle of Vietnam. At this stage of the film, Rambo is clearly suspicious about the whole situation and Stallone brilliantly conveys his doubts just through his eyes...

The key doubt clearly involves his chances of getting down to his vest but the clever plot twist here is that we’re not actually provided with a good reason for him to strip off. But like all good special forces troops, he’s soon gone 'nipple free' and the ladies in the room start a-groaning.

At this point, I ask them why they find Stallone so attractive and why a certain Welshman is being ignored. I’m told to shut up and Monica runs a thumb menacingly down her replica Rambo knife.

So, I turn my attention back to the film.

Where was I? Oh yes…

So, it doesn’t take Johnny Boy long to strip down to his vest but to get to the next stage of the plot, we need some reason a man can abandon his vest in the middle of Vietnam. Naturally, he can’t just go about throwing vest hither and thither. And this is where Steven Berkoff comes in. Rambo is captured.

This part of the film is probably the most distressing. His capture is totally unexpected, especially since it comes only a minute after him killing a dozen enemy soldiers with little more than a chicken (below).

It's a terribly unexpected turn of events. The chicken dies for nothing and Rambo is captured by a Russian general who is in Vietnam supplying weapons to somebody or other. Berkoff is being quite menacing and conveys his evil intents brilliantly by making his voice go from to mumbling to VERY VERY LOUD in a drop of a hat. Or indeed a vest. Which is more appropriate since he helpfully decides to torture Rambo and we soon see the now bare-chested hero strapped to an electrified rack with his nipples perking to the voltage.

I found the torture scene difficult to watch, involving as it does the implied cruelty towards a vest. Not only don’t we know what happened to the vest, we don't even get to see it again. I was really quite relieved when the torture came to an end and Rambo started to mow down scores of enemy soldiers, hacking his way through them in gory fashion.

Rambo then spends the rest of the film with his upper torso covered by little more than body oil and the occasional scorch marks from firing heavy callibre machine guns.

Gabby was quite taken with it and I believe Monica had some kind of semi-religious experience.

As for the Chipster: he thought it a reasonable nights entertainment if you like snuff-movies in which vests are brutalised. Stallone’s performance is worth picking out and Richard Crenna can chew lines like no other actor. No man was born to utter lines like ‘Damn it John, this is personnel’ or ‘Don't ever count me with you and your scum’ or ‘It was a lie, wasn't it? Just like the whole damn war, a lie!‘ etc. etc.

As for Berkoff, he’s in fine form and shows why he’s one of our finest actors. It all ended badly for him, of course, just like it does for him in Octopussy and Beverely Hills Cop 2. He finally comes a cropper in the third act when he gets shot through a hole in the windscreen of Rambo’s chopper which, quite symbolically, is in the same shapes as the USA. I thought it a nice touch and a very moving tribute to all the lives lost in Vietnam.

The film ends with some speech in which Rambo asks that his country loves him as much as he loves it, but to be honest, I didn’t believe a word of it. A man whose shoulders overhand his hips by such an amount shouldn’t be giving speeches about anything other than the best way to eat bananas with his feet.

Once the credits came to an end I turned up the lights and found the two girls in tears and in a mood to go cut something. I decided the best plan was to go to bed so I left them going through their clothes drawers in search of vests. I heard the front door close around midnight and I don’t believe they got home before seven.

But Rambo 2 is like that. In terms of script, performance, and direction, it’s a mess. But if you’re in the mood for a film that will inspire you to do great things in a vest, then there are none better.

Milky Words

I’ve been plagued by words. Nasty, horrible, loathsome little things. You think you’ve mastered them, rounded them up on the page, contained them inside the fence posts of commas, semi colons, and full stops. And then they overrun you again.

But that’s the trouble with being an articulate wordsmith. The very thing you try to master always has a greater hold over you.

It began this morning when Gabby committed another gross violation against the English language. We were sitting at the breakfast table and Gabby had her foot wedged against the toast rack as she painted her nails.

‘Chippy,’ she said. ‘Monica say she stay one more weeks.’

I went cold.

‘A week not long,’ she carried on. ‘A week only six days.’

‘Stop thinking in Romanian,’ I snapped and promptly dropped my newspaper into my Alpen. ‘You’re in Europe now. A week is seven days.’

‘Well even seven days isn’t long,’ she replied as she applied another layer of Ronseal to her toe nails. She leaned back, admiring the finish.

‘Even one day is too long,’ I told her. ‘I wouldn’t mind it if she didn’t practise her knife throwing in the flat. It feels like a lifetime when you’ve got razor sharp blades whistling past your ears at all hours of the day.’

‘Every hour of the day? And what does that mean?’ sulked Gabby. ‘Six days or seven days. What difference? Only twelve hours.’

‘There you go again!’ I groaned, as I inspected my ruined paper. ‘Europe, Gabby. You’re in the EU now. A day is twenty four hours and an hour is sixty minutes.’

‘Sixty?’ She looked puzzled. ‘What happens to the other fourteen.’

In Romania, you see, each hour has seventy four minutes.

‘They go into the next hour,’ I explained as I squeezed the milk from a lactose intolerant Daniel Finkelstein.

‘So the next hour has seventy four minutes?’

‘No, the next hour has… Look,’ I said, throwing the paper to one side, ‘does it really matter?’

She shrugged. ‘I suppose not,’ she said. ‘But only so long as Monica can stay an extra week.’

‘I tell you what,’ I said. ‘How about she stays an extra month?’

‘Really? You mean that?’ She furrowed her brows. ‘Chippy mean Gabby’s sister can stay an extra 45 days?’

‘No,’ I sighed. ‘You’re in Europe, remember. And in Europe a month is four days long. I want her gone by Monday.’

An Evening With Jan Leeming

I think we can all agree that it’s been a frantic few days and I haven’t really had chance to explain what I did during my enforced absence. But before I do that, I’d like to direct your attention to my previous post. For some odd reason, people have failed to read between the lines and left here with the impression that I asked them not to vote for me. Of course, I did ask people not to vote for me but do you really need any greater incentive to go and throw your car keys in the Blog Power salad bowl? You might end up going home with the Chipster. What more can I say than that?

So far I seem to have nominations in the categories for ‘Most Articulate Wordsmith’ and ‘Most Consistently Entertaining Blog or Column’, so please go and add your nominations to the pile smelling of hazelnut scented buttock scrub. If I get through the nomination stage, I vow to use every contact in my little black book to help my campaign for election. And when I become king of the blogs, things will change around here… All those people who mocked me, they will become the mocked. And if you've not been with me, then you've been against me and I shall smite yea with the wrath of...

Sorry.

The Chipster can get a little carried away when wearing his black leather thong of world domination.

Which, by a rather odd quirk of circumstance, is what I was wearing over the weekend.

I’ve been promising to tell you about my weekend but now’s my chance. I’ll be honest and admit that all my best thongs were in the wash on Saturday when it came to attending the charity bash I’d help organise in aid of the local leper hospice. A whole galaxy of stars were on hand to see me in my black leather thong and they seem properly impressed by the scale and quality of the pouched beast as Gabby and I mingled with the likes of Jeremy Beadle, Jan Leeming, John Noakes, Mike (the barman from Only Fools and Horses)…

I can't say enough good things about the event. It was a fantastic evening of song, dance, a little animal cruelty, and lots of drunken merriment. And at the midway point, we all had ourselves a raffle and put ourselves up for sale for the evening..

And to cut a long story short, I won Jan Leeming for the night!

Well, what can I say about Jan? She's a lovely lady with many funny tales to tell about life in the BBC. Things I discovered: Nicholas Witchell is double jointed and Michael Buerk collects teabags. Gabby wasn’t too impressed, of course, when I pulled out Jan's name and neither was Alexi Sayle who drew the shortest straw in the barrel, so to speak, and walked away with my Romanian buttercup. Never have I seen a bald slight-overweight man go as pale as I did when Gabby decided to show him how to skin a dog. I grant that it all got pretty gory for a while and poor Sharon Osbourne’s shitzu will never be the same again. By the time we managed to prise it out of Gabby’s hands, the poor animal was wearing its own ears around its tail.

But I’m a big enough man to not allow such a thing to spoil my evening. Around ten o’clock, I slipped out with Jan so we could enjoy the fresh air. We got talking and it turned out that she has a great fondness for yoghurt. I also have a great love of the well cultured stuff and we nipped to a local all night delicatessen which sells the best strawberry yoghurt imaginable.

When we got back to the party, the thing had gone with a rowdy mess. Keith Chegwin can always be relied upon to ruin a good show. He was standing on the stage singing vulgar ditties about the Welsh and Pat Butcher (the one from Eastenders) had Terry Griffiths (the snooker player) on the floor and trapped behind her pink. That’s when Chrisopher Biggins came running from the crowd and snatched the tub of yoghurt out of Jan’s hands. Jan, of course, wouldn’t put with that. I couldn't stop her grabbing the nearest object – which happened to be a sink plunger – and went lurching into battle. I didn’t want to get involved. Nothing worse than celebrities fighting over scraps of food.

Instead I went and found Gabby who was alone in a corner of the room picking at an antique grand piano with her pocket knife. She wanted to slip away without anybody noticing our leaving but I had to give Jan a wave. I also promised to send her some more of the locally produced yoghurt but I don’t think she heard me. She was dragging an unconscious Christopher Biggins around the hall by the plunger which was stuck to his forehead with something pink, sticky and produced by a quality Welsh dairy.

Overall, it was a bloody good night that raised plenty of money for charity.

Dear Gabby

[As promised yesterday, the Chipster's having a day's rest and handing my blog over to Gabby. She's already had a few emails and I hope she'll give you nothing but good advice. Chip.]

Dear Gabby,

I think it's great that you can help me. You see my girlfriend doesn’t love me. She is always complaining. She says I don’t cut my toenails and won’t let me fix my motorbike in the kitchen. She also thinks that I eat too much. What should I do?

Henry P.

Gabby says:

If woman don’t like man with toenails and motorbike then she not real woman. I think toenails sexy. Back in Romania, toenails are first thing we look for on man. On a donkey too but that’s not sexy. That’s just to say how old they are. Gabby say that motorbike in kitchen is problem. You should compromise. Move it in living room, away from food. Kitchen is for cooking and rare times when you must cut toenails. Nothing else. If Gabby’s suggestions don’t work, you should get rid of woman and find somebody else. Man with good toenails sure to find sexy woman. I have Russian friend if you interested. She like man with toenails and own house.

-+-

Dear Gabby,

I’ve been reading Chip’s diary for a while now and wondering if he’s as great as he claims. He doesn’t look that good to me and I’ve been known to go out with some right ugly mutts.

Sharon

Gabby Says:

You foolish woman, Sharon. Gabby says Chip is stallion. You finish your silly talk and come to Bangor and see Chip in action. Man in posing pouch is like god come down from sky to wiggle hips in face. Lovely. You see but don’t go saying bad things about Chip or I get sister to cut you with knife. You warned.

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Dear Gabby

I am trying to break into the world of music with my sister. We can both sing really well and wondered if you could us some tips about reaching the top.

Heather and Lisa K.

Gabby says:

Have you good leg? Rumpy too? Like we say in old country: best beef on big bottom. That is same for singing. Don’t worry about horrible voices or if you got warty face. You get meat on bone and then let photographers do rest. We also like to wear tiny dresses. They help too if you bend over. And never turn down a job especially if it involves bending over. And any job is better than no job. So, when they say come and sing to soldiers. You go. We sang to soldiers in Iraq and they let us shoot guns from helicopters. We want to go back to do again but with less singing and more shooting. Gabby likes AK47. It her favourite.

-+-

Dear Gabby

Is it true that women prefer men with sense of humour than men with good looks? I don’t have either but I think it would be easier to learn some jokes than it would to make myself handsome.

Derek M.

Gabby says:

Rubbish. Give me boring man looks like stallion than funny funny ha ha man comedian. As we say in Romania: you can not milk mule. If you could milk mule, we have huge dairy industry. You can’t so we don’t. But you cannot milk funny man either, and that is Gabby's point. Get man with looks and good body. It like buying a strong mule. You never regret owning strong mule and people like you. People laugh at one legged chicken but it not make man happy when he eats it and nobody comes for dinner for one legged chicken. If you not look good, you get exercise. Face not important if you got good body. If you got good face and bad body, nobody notice good face. Also man with big scalaragurang is important too except on goat when it better small.

-+-

Dear Gabby,

I worry about you. Chip treats you quite horribly and says some rather cruel things about you and your sister. I’m sure you’re nothing like he says you are. Do you really shoot sparrows with a gun? Does your sister really carry knife around? Why do you stay with him? I think he’s horrible.

Michelle C.

Gabby says:

What Chip say? He say I his sexy cheeky girl and he loves me. He not say thing wrong about Gabby or sister. I not shoot sparrows, no, I shoot starlings and pigeons and crows. My sister carries knife, nine inch blade with saw on back. Like Rambo knife but sharper. But there’s nothing wrong with sister with knife. It’s legal. She licensed manicurist and it for taking off bunion. I see her take bunion of man who called her rude name. Bunion the same size as his leg, which made him need wooden bunion afterwards.

Birdy Flu Strikes North Wales

You’ll have to forgive me if I skip the pleasantries today. I had a morning that’s not to be envied unless you’re the sort of person who dreams of making animal sacrifices to the gods Fad and Fickle.

As you might know, it’s been confirmed that North Wales has been struck by avian flu. It was news that was sure to set the cat among the pigeons, or at least, one Romanian among the chickens.

The Chipster was doing a few stretching exercises in the front room and had touched his nose to his knees, fingers to his toes, when a sudden scream shattered the peace and quiet of an otherwise quite restful Bangor. I turned around, ready to make my apologies to Monica, who I had assumed had walked in on my exercising. It’s a simple fact of the world that not every appreciates the sight of two exposed, though perfectly formed, buttocks first thing in the morning.

I was wrong. It was Gabby holding the newspaper.

‘Birdy flu!’ she said. ‘Birdy flu in Wales.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked her, taking the paper from her quivering fingers. It wouldn’t be the first time her poor grasp of English had caused her to worry unduly and before things got out of control I thought it best to check the facts.

Only, just then, the door to the spare room opened and Monica appeared. She was already dressed for the day in her black combat trousers and denim jacket but was in the process of adding a final touch by buckling a commando knife to a concealed pocket on the inside of her thigh.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘Birdy flu!’ screeched Gabby.

‘Birdy flu?’ screeched Monica.

‘Yes, Birdy flu!’

Monica turned to me. ‘Did you hear, Chippy darling? It’s the birdy flu!’

I shrugged my naked shoulders. I mean: what else is a man meant to do when it’s birdy flu? And there it was in the paper. ‘Bird Flu in North Wales.’

Gabby snatched the paper off me and examined the page one more time, this time chewing her bottom lip in worry.

‘Well, that’s that,’ she declared, threw the paper down and looked to her sister. ‘Gabby think this job The Cheeky Girls…’

‘Oooooookaaaaaayyyyyy!’ squealed Monica as Gabby dashed off to the kitchen. She came back with my best set of kitchen knives in one hand, a rubber tube, and an empty litre-sized milk carton.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Birdy flu not catch Gabby unprepared.’

Well, I barely had time to throw on something sensible, but with my best green thong and a pair of sandals I followed the twins out the flat, down the back staircase, and to the garage where we all piled into the car. Ten minutes later, Gabby hit the brakes at the allotment and told us to hurry.

‘I think you’re overreacting,’ I suggested as Monica passed Gabby the knifes from the back seat.

Only the Cheeky Girls weren’t for waiting. They were soon running off down the small lane leading to the allotments, and then quickly over the fence that encloses the chicken coop.

‘I hold them and you do the cheeeeeeeck,’ shouted Gabby as she raised the door the coop. The noise she had made in the sound of her mouth and I have no idea how you’d spell it.

‘Righty!’ said Monica who had selected a large cleaver from the knife set. ‘Unless Chippy want to do the cheeeeeeeck…’ She too made the noise in the side of her mouth.

‘What exactly do you mean, cheeeeeeeeck?’ I asked.

Monica slipped the knife from her thigh and waved it in her hand. ‘You know. Cheeeeeeck,’ she said and passed the blade less than an inch from my windpipe.

I leapt a step back, which isn’t an easy thing to do when only wearing a thong and flip-flops.

‘I’m not murdering chickens,’ I said.

‘We not murder,’ said Gabby as she manhandled the first bird. ‘We save from fate.’

‘Hacking at chickens because there’s a very slight chance they’ll catch the birdy flu doesn’t seem like saving them from their fate,’ I observed.

She turned to me. ‘So, you don’t do cutting. You go and take pipe. Suck petrol from tank. Put in bottle.’

‘What do you want petrol for?’

‘Silly,’ she grinned. ‘We need to burn chickens. Stop birdy flu.’

I rubbed a hand over my face. ‘Do you know how dangerous this sounds? I’m not standing near a naked flame. I’m covered in oil. I could ignite at the drop of a thong.’

Monica turned to me, a darkly impatient look on her face. ‘Monica think Chippy coward.’

‘Chippy is a coward,’ I said. ‘In fact, he’s proud of the fact. I’m not slaughtering chickens. It’s not how we do things in this country.’

Gabby stood up, chicken in her arms. ‘What you mean?’ she asked. ‘I saw TV. I saw turkeys in trucks. Bernie Matthews and his turkey twizzlers.’

‘Well that’s where you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘In a case like this, the government sorts out the mess and then the EU come along and pay us lots of money for having lost our chickens. Bernie Matthews made a nice bit of money despite all of his troubles.’

The girls fell silent.

‘How we get money from EU?’ asked Gabby finally.

‘You just have to be a member.’

‘And is Romania in EU?’

‘From January the first,’ I replied.

She looked at the chicken. ‘So, government kill chickens? We get lots of money?’

‘That’s the way it works.’.

The sisters looked at each other and then Gabby dropped the bird.

‘The Cheeky Girls!’ they both screeched and then they began to do the hokey cokey, surrounded by some of the luckiest chickens in North Wales and a man in a thong and flip flops who, for some reason, couldn't consider himself even half as blessed.

At Knifepoint With Cultural Amnesia

Sorry for the slightly late in the day update, Chipettes. I’ve had to take a day’s rest and force myself to watch a pretty dull FA Cup final. Not that I’m complaining about their being a lack of excitement in the Chipster household. I had enough of that yesterday, which started with me trying to make a five pounds saving and ended at the point of a paperknife.

We’d gone over to Birmingham to see Gabby’s management team who are still working hard to come up with a hit as big as the hokey cokey. We spent the lunch hour browsing the local Borders, which is where I’d intended to buy Clive James’s new book of essays, Cultural Amnesia. I’d had a quick browse through the book, read the opening paragraphs on James’ piece of W.C. Fields, which I thought made it worth the cover price alone, and I was making my way to the counter when Gabby leapt out from the bargain books brandishing a novelty paperknife in the shape of Count Duckula.

‘What that?’ she growled.

‘What what?’ I asked, having quickly hid six hundred pages or more behind my back.

‘What you buy, Chippy?’

‘I buy nothing I said, truthfully, as I tried to slip into the aisle of murder mysteries before I was involved in one myself.

But it was too late. The great Romanian sleuth ran a finger over her waxed moustache, grabbed my wrist, and dragged the book out into the open where everybody could see my profligacy.

‘How much?’ she asked, knife waving around my loins.

‘Twenty pounds… a five pound saving off he cover price,’ my loins replied.

‘You not pay twenty pounds for this,’ she said. ‘You put it back right now.’

I might have reminded her about the copy of my English Auden which she and her cabal of free versifiers has munched their way though yesterday.

‘I won’t put it back you heathen,’ I hissed. ‘I’m buying it. He’s making an excellent case for not being so intellectually dry as to ignore every form of culture.’

‘Culture?’ she spat. ‘We save for holiday to Romania!’

‘Save away,’ I said. ‘I’m buying the Clive James.’

She raised Count Duckula menacingly.

‘Step back,’ she warned. ‘Gabby not allow Chippy to waste our money.’

‘It’s thong money,’ I said.

She stabbed at the book with the opener. ‘How much on Amazon?’

‘That’s not the point…’

‘How much on Amazon?’

‘Twelve pounds,’ I admitted.

‘Then you buy from Amazon or Gabby stick you with paper knife in shape of duck.’

And there she had me. It was a duck. And Clive James’ latest book is indeed twelve pounds on Amazon. But, then, there’s also something in buying a book and walking out with it. It’s never the same when the postman arrives with the Amazon crate.

Yet in favour of Amazon: have they ever tried to slice off your manhood with something made for envelopes? Precisely. And that’s exactly how I imagine a certain cultural critic would have responded to these most trying of times…

Club Gabby

I had an odd dream last night. I was on my way to see Clive James, who for some inexplicable reason, was living the life of a mysterious recluse in a Kowloon shanty town. I had to go through some strange Daliesque doorways to reach him, which led me to a glass elevator that began to rise diagonally over a landscape of 1930s New York, sepia tinted and wholly photographic. When I reached Clive, I found him to be extremely pleasant and a very gracious host, despite living in squalor with an Argentinean housekeeper and a large Afghan hound with long blond tresses which kept attacking me whenever I clenched my fists.

That’s when I began to hear the sound of clicking.

Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was coming from my hips. Clive thought so too. A lifetime spent doing high kicks and hip thrusts can wear a stripper’s hips away in half the time of your average Premiership footballer. It’s why so many of us have so much titanium inside us by the time we’re thirty that we're less human than a Terminator. Clive told me that it was an omen of what’s to come and a reminder to keep myself well oiled and my joints lubricated.

Only then did I wake up and realise that there was nothing wrong with my hips, which were running as silky smooth as ever. Clive had also disappeared, which was the biggest disappointment because I had so many things to ask him.

Then I heard the clicking again and realised that not all my dreams were insubstantial. Some mysterious clicking force had descended on the apartment while Clive James had been explaining the mysteries of literary punditry to me.

I looked at the clock. It was horribly late for a weekday morning, nearly half-past eleven, but then I remembered that last night I’d over indulged myself with the alcohol and a sad French film involving the innocent murder of young rabbits. Pulling on a fresh thong, I walked through the apartment, following the sound which I could now clearly tell was coming from the living room.

‘Whow!’ said a voice as I turned the corner past the bathroom. ‘Check out those buns! Rock solids at twelve o’clock!’

I turned around and found myself face to face with a young woman wearing a long black leather overcoat and a beret perched on the top of her head.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, oblivious to the fact that she was looking at my thong as though she was having a religious experience. It happens to me all the time.

When she straightened herself up she resembled a rather lascivious stick of liquorice.

‘I’m Jonjo,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’

I thought her question defied reason so I chose not to answer it. ‘And what are you doing in my apartment?’ I asked.

‘Hey! Stay cool!,’ she replied, guiltily waving her arms around like Eve juggling invisible apples. ‘Don’t get your thong in a… in a…’

‘Twist?’ I suggested.

‘Hey! Cool. Twist, yes, twist. Don’t get it in a twist.’

‘And I asked what you’re doing in my apartment? And what the hell is that clicking?’

‘We’re here to celebrate words!' she said. 'You know? How great they are… How much we enjoy using them to… you know… to express… you know... stuff…’

‘We?’

She waved her hands ambiguously. ‘Don’t get plural on me. I is we.’

That ‘I is we’ bit was enough for me. I turned my back on Jonjo and walked into the main room.

Sitting on the floor, around the sofa, across the chairs and some sitting on the window seat, were an assortment of the oddest people you’re ever likely to find gathered in a stripper’s apartment on a Thursday morning. They were completely oblivious to my presence as they were too busy clicking their fingers as they gazed at the figure standing at the middle of the room.

It was Gabby, holding my copy of the English Auden in one hand and a large crocus in the other.

‘The crowing of the cock’, she said – or more precisely read – ‘though it may scare the dead, call on the fire to strike, sever the yawning cloud, shall also summon up the pointed crocus top, which smelling of the mould, breathes of the underworld…’

At which point the crowd began another chorus of clicking and Gabby danced around in a circle waving the crocus over their heads as though it were a magic wand.

‘Ahem,’ said the only cock in the room qualified to crow.

Gabby turned to me and smiling hugely waved the crocus at me.

‘Morning Chippy!’ she squealed.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I asked, in no mood to be won over by a high pitched Romanian with a crocus. My injured foot was beginning to throb and I could still feel the teeth of an imaginary Afghan hound in my arm. Even the memory of Clive’s reassuring words to his dog (‘it’s only rubber, Mildred’) could do nothing to calm my agitation.

‘Hey, is it time to get down to our undies?’ asked a woman sitting on the end of the sofa. ‘That would be so cool. So cool and Frank O'Hara...’

‘Well I’m not joining in,’ replied a gaunt man in black sitting beside her. He was giving me one of those looks as if to suggest he was in awe of the Chipster’s perfectly honed body. ‘There’s always somebody who wants to bring muscle to a gathering of minds…’

‘Who are these people?’ I asked Gabby.

‘My poetry club,’ she said and anointed them all with a wave of her crocus.

‘What?’

‘Oh, you’ll get to know all the names,’ she said. ‘They’re here to read poetry. Aren’t we, everybody?’

The room filled with more of that insufferable clicking.

‘Will you all stop that?’ I snapped. ‘And what’s that you’re reading?’

She held up the book. ‘Oh, I took it from your poetry shelf,’ she replied. ‘We play poem game.’

‘A poem game?’

‘Like drinking game but it involves poems.’ She looked at my face and must have recognised the look of mild curiosity. ‘We take turns,’ she began to explain.’ We each pick a poem at random and then we read it. Then we rip it out and eat it.’

‘You do what?’

‘It’s poetry, Chippy! You wouldn’t understand.’

‘You know,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘We internalise the mystery… It's ruminatio of the word...’

‘You’ve been eating my English Auden?’ I sobbed, snatching the book from her crocus scented fingers. ‘Do you know how much this cost? It’s a Faber & Faber…’

‘And very tasty it was too,’ said a man sitting on the window seat. He was picking his teeth with his little finger. ‘I’ve just eaten the Night Mail and it went down lovely,’ he said. ‘That passage between Beattock and Glasgow went really smooth.’

‘It was all downhill,’ said some wit from the sofa. I glared at the gaunt man before I flipped through the torn edges of my ruined volume. All the shorter verse were gone and some sections of the longer poems had teeth marks where somebody had nibbled away the page, sometimes almost up to the spine.

‘You’re all heathens,’ I cried as I threw the book to the floor. And then, without another word, I turned my thong on the crowd.

‘Cool cheeks, man!’ said a voice to my rear but I gone past the point where a sane man cares anymore. Soon, my head was buried beneath the cold cotton fabric of my pillow. I was back in bed again, oblivious to the sound of the clicking fingers, which now marked the digesting of another classic of the English canon.

I consoled myself by trying to imagine what Clive James might say about the terrible age we live in.

Save Me From Boredom, Blogdom!

The wound in my foot was healing fine until Gabby insisted on swabbing it down with potato gin. Forget gauze pads and sterile environments. My little Romanian miracle worker dragged my leg up onto the coffee table, swigged back a mouthful of her latest brew, and spat it all over my foot. She promised it would kill bacteria. I only know that I can’t feel my toes and the carpet has started to turn white. It’s all worrying but Gabby tells me that’s only natural and swears she can’t remember the last time she had any feeling in her tongue.

This is how you find me, today, Wednesday, my Thonglateers. I’m Bangor’s sexist invalid, hobbling naked around my flat and trying to find something productive to do. I’m not even thinking about how much it is going to cost me to get Romania’s answer to Pam Ayres into print.

As I type this, Gabby is out haggling with Bangor’s stationers; bulk-buying notebooks ahead of her next assault on the north face of Mount Parnassus. This morning, she left me this bit of doggerel to post in her absence. I’ve only agreed to do so knowing that it’s sure to gain me your pity…

My Fun Tuesday

Gabby shot sparrow; Gabby shot a thrush,
Chippy picked gun up and shot himself in foot.
His blood was real messy and such a sight to see,
Before we all went off to Accident and Emergency.
Chippy now is crippled, like bus run over dog,
And makes groany noises like half squished frog.
I could put him out of misery, since he’s lost all sense of fun,
But Gabby must suffer because Chippy’s hidden her gun.

© Gabby, 2007.

In all honesty, can any one of you out there blame me for trying to escaping from reality?

In desperation, I picked up ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys, which is part of the reading list for my FE class. After only half an hour and ten pages, I felt like shooting myself in my other foot just to end the tedium. It was an act of restraint just throwing the book out the window. I have since spent the rest of my time browsing the day’s blogs, which is where I found some slight relief by considering the problems of blog publishing.

Clare, at the Girl Friday blog, distracted me from the pain with a link to a piece in The Guardian by ‘The Girl With A One Track Mind’ about turning blogs to books. Naturally, it attracted my attention. I’m a man with more than one unpublished novel to my name, so I know more than most what it’s like to be at the bottom of the world’s slush piles. Yet it also makes it hard to be objective about The Girl’s conclusions. She thinks that blogging is a wonderful thing, given that ‘the very act of writing online allows for quality material and this is down to one main factor - the readers' comments.’ Perhaps The Wife in the North would share the same sentiments, but I’m sure that I don’t.

For me, the fallacy of blogging is the notion that we can be discovered in a more fair or practical way than the old methods of going about such things. To take Gabby as an example: is there any coincidence in the fact that her genius is only coming to light because others see something in her poetry that I can’t? Her inarticulate nonsense is perfect for a medium which doesn’t suite any kind of thought-out writing. Writers who write literary novels can never hope to be discovered through a blog because their skill takes take time to get just right through rewriting. The same is true of thrillers, comedy novels, and whodunits. Somebody recently asked me to help them write a detective novel online, which, to my way of thinking, just couldn’t work, or at least, not as a blog containing the work in progress.

Blogs are an effective for writers who just want to put work out there, without having to worry about being accepted. Rarely is it about quality. Those that find the most success seem to find it through those same qualities that make other things successful on the web. They tend to be victories for the values of the obscene freak-show. For all its popularity and success, ‘The Girl With A One Track Mind’ represents a height of sub-literary prurience; a single joke that has probably run well beyond itself in terms of originality, but retaining readership because, given the size of the web, there are always people to whom it is new, dangerous, or (mildly) erotic. I don't know how much mileage is left in my thongs but I hope there's more to me than the contents of my posing pouch.

What can I say?

I’m in pain and it’s raining outside. My foot is beginning to ache and I’m only thankful that I can feel my toes again.

And now I can hear a key in the door. I better post this before my Romanian bard comes in and demands that I include the dozen or so poems she’s sure to have written in the space of the last hour.

The Trouble With Edwina Currie

I discovered Gabby in a black mood this morning. She was sitting at the kitchen window with her air pistol, shooting at sparrows in the garden below. I made my way slowly around to the fridge, having discovered on many previous occasions that it’s dangerous to disturb a trigger-happy Romanian with a handgun.

‘So,’ I said, as I began to squeeze my morning orange, ‘are the sparrows biting today?’

Crack. The distant squawk of wildlife, though I can’t dismiss the possibility that it was the postman.

‘Edwina Currie thinks I have talent,’ said my death-dealing buttercup as simple as an accusation gets before noon.

‘And so do I,’ I replied, but inwardly steeling myself for an argument I knew I simply would have to win.

‘So why won’t you lend me money?’

‘I haven’t got a penny to spare,’ I said. ‘My financial thong is empty. And if it wasn’t, we can do better things than pay somebody to publish your poetry. Vanity publishing is just that. Vanity. When they see your genius, somebody will offer you good money to publish it.’

She frowned, fired, and a starling suffered a mortal flesh wound.

‘Edwina said…’

‘I don’t give a damn what Edwina said,’ I cried. ‘You have to still to learn some things about the British. We’re a nation who like to see people make fools of themselves.’

‘So why did she say I was good poet?’

I hadn’t the spirit to explain the rest of what the needlessly profane one-time Junior Minister for Health had to say on the matter of poetry. I merely regretted that the bad language she’d been recently displaying on my blog hadn’t been put to more use a decade ago when she should have been more vehement in explaining the dangers of under-cooked poultry. I might never have suffered the food poisoning that led to my dismal A level results, eventual rejection from university, and led me to my current low paying work as a male stripper.

These were the distracted thoughts that went through my head as I snatched the pistol from Gabby’s hand and managed to shoot myself in the foot.

‘Damn that Edwina Currie!’ I cursed, falling on the floor as blood made an early appearance over the Chipster’s slippers. Even then, I was proud of myself for not resorting to profanity, even as I felt the blood begin to seep between my toes.

‘Chippy? You okay?’ asked Gabby, rushing to my side. ‘It okay if we don’t publish poems,’ she added, cradling my head. ‘I’m not good at rhyming yet…’

‘Shot… foot,’ I gasped, feeling suddenly faint with the pain.

‘No, no, that not good rhyme,’ said Gabby, apparently oblivious to the serious nature of my injury. ‘Cut rhymes with foot. Soot rhymes with foot…’ She went silent and I believe I passed out for a few minutes. The next thing I remember was Gabby slapping my face and forcing a piece of paper into my hand.

Gabby shot a sparrow, then a thrush,
Then poor Chippy shot himself in foot.

‘Does this rhyme?’ she asked.

I was beyond caring. My foot was a congealed bloody mess the likes of which have slapped many a certificate 18 on a film. Tears ran down my cheeks and pooled on my lips. ‘Help me,’ I pleaded. ‘My foot…’

‘Pah,’ said my Romanian humanitarian looking at my yellow slippers, now completely covered with Chip Dale’s finest O positive. ‘Gabby uncle once shot foot off with shotgun. He did not stop work until he pick up every potato on field.’

‘Please…’ I begged.

‘Finish washing up,’ said Gabby, dropping my head onto the tiled floor. ‘I want to finish this poem before we go.’

An hour later, I was in Bangor’s emergency room waiting for a nurse to bandage my foot. A doctor has just pulling a lump of pellet from it, which Gabby had taken as a souvenir. ‘I think I make into earring,’ she said, holding the bloody mess up to a lobe.

‘It suits you,’ I replied over lips parched dry with suffering.

‘So, do you think Edwina Currie would read my collected poems?’ asked Gabby. Now having turned her attention to a box of scalpels she’d found in a drawer, she began to juggle three.

As I watched the razor sharp blades arc through the air, I thought of the nine hundred pages of tightly typed manuscript sitting at home, waiting to be discovered like an extra forty cantos by a Romanian Ezra Pound.

‘I’m sure she would,’ I said with a grimace or a smile. ‘I’m sure she would…’

Gabby’s Poem To The Dalai Lama

I had a busy Sunday. After I’d finished watching the football and signing an online petition to jail Paris Hilton, I wrote a long deeply spiritual letter to his Holiness, the Dalai Lama. I barely had time to finish it and post it before I had to head off to the Green Dragon Tavern where I did my randy traffic warden routine, which has become something of a crowd favourite every Sunday night.

The letter had been Gabby’s idea. Personally, I’d resent it if the Dalai Lama turned up in Bangor and tried to teach me my job. There’s little that a man in a toga can tell a man born to the thong, but even should he be enlightened in some mystical ways of the hidden pouch, I’d still question his interference. Which is why I hesitated before writing to tell him how to do his job.

There are times, however, when even the reincarnations of Avalokiteśvara needs a bit of advice from North Wales’ top stripper and, in this case, I’ve put him straight about this business of his retirement.

If you’ve slept through the weekend, you might not have noticed that the Dalai Lama has decided to quit public life. The news brought Gabby no end of disappointment, given all the charity work she does on behalf of Nepal. I try not to involve myself in her causes as she won’t help me with the charity work I do on behalf of nipples. However, Gabby thought I might be able to talk some sense in the Lama. She’d already written a letter of her own and, bless her rhymeless little heart, included a self-penned poem in it.

In your humble Chipster’s opinion, the following bit of 'poetry' is more likely to make a spiritual leader lock himself away in a monastery, but I ask that you don’t laugh. I’ve promised to post it here, though I’m sure the sceptical ones among you will think it lacks a certain poetic quality. All I can do is reprint exactly what Gabby scribbled on the flyleaf of my first edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land…

To The Dalai Lama On The Occasion of His Announcing His Retirement

Wise old man who’s more Dalai than lhama,
Do not retire while still in your prime-a.
Wiser than Attenborough, purer than Snow,
(Both David and Dickie, Peter and Jono),
You’re balder than Richard (the Cliff and the knight),
And like Felicity Kendal, don’t enjoy a knife fight,
But when it comes down to your spiritual healing,
You’re better than Cilla, or even Jan Leeming.
You’re also eternal, like Match of the Day,
Though your next repeat is a lifetime away.
So don’t go and choose that Buddhist retreat,
When we could have two weeks together (timeshare) in Crete,
Because dressed in a toga, you’re my super hero,
With love, from Gabby, Chip, and Richard Gere-o.

© Gabby, 2007

Well, I’ve done my bit by reprinting it and I think you’ll agree that it doesn’t make much sense, especially that bit about Cliff Richard.

Everybody knows he is actually the twelfth reincarnation of the original Cliff Richard…

Brief Pre-Update Update

Gabby has just broken down my study door to remind me to remind you to tune into the Eurovision Song Content tomorrow night.

Now I’ve done that, I can also admit that I’m a secret fan of Eurovision. It’s the only night of the year when the BBC opens its doors to sarcasm. Terry Wogan is a man after my own heart in that respect and I love nothing more than to sit here eating a large bag of crisps while providing my own commentary. I’m usually the first to vote on the oddball in the mix and last year I was sorely disappointed that Lithuania's LT United didn’t win with their rousing and deeply spiritual song, ’We Are The Winners’.



(Isn't that fantastic? And it gets better when you read about these chaps and what they did to help promote freedoms behind the Iron Curtain...)

Being Romanian, Gabby takes it all at face value. She doesn’t see anything wrong with shiny orange faces with rictus smiles. She thinks the whole thing is a celebration of European musical genius. I, on the other hand, thinks it is a fine reminder why the Good Lord put twenty two miles of good quality water between us and the rest of Europe.

May the best man dressed as a large Bulgarian tadpole win. So long as Scooch* come last.

* As I’ve pointed out elsewhere a while ago, Scooch have an unfortunate name if you check your slang dictionary. I wouldn’t like to discourage you from supporting them but I would like you to first consider what kind of message you’d be sending to the rest of Europe.

The Long Bank Holiday 2

If you were to have told me, last week, that black masses were being held under the same roof as that which provides shelter to Wales’ largest thong collection, I would have called you delusional with latent feelings of inadequacy. You’d not be the first to feel in awe of the Chipster and I dare say you won’t be the last. After all, it’s hard not to feel somewhat inferior to a man with good looks, a perfect body, sharp wits, and inexplicable sexual chemistry.

Yet should you have made the same comment today, I’d have merely nodded my head and asked your opinion on the best to get rid of an infestation of warlocks. And midget warlocks at that...

When Mrs. Tunpipe promised that we’d have an unexpected visitor, little did I expect events to take a turn towards the cooler end of the Dulux colour card quite so quickly. Gabby had barely finished cleaning Archibald the goat in the bathtub (and in the process, using the last of my apple and tea tingle shampoo to get the congealed blood from its back), when there came a loud insistent knock on the door.

‘That must be the Dark Lord himself,’ I muttered, checking my less than humble self one last time in the mirror.

I’d decided that if a man is to argue with a Satanist, he must really look the part and take a side. Dressed in my white suit, with white tie, shirt and shoes, I looked like a respectable member of heaven’s advance guard in search of a prime time spot in BBC1’s light entertainment schedule. It might be too much to say I looked ‘angelic’ but on second thoughts, with my good looks, ‘angelic’ is much more on the nail than to simply say that I looked presentable. If there are such things as stud muffins in heaven, then I was one of those. And if there’s not, then let’s just settle on admitting that I looked in the mood to cha-cha-cha around a ballroom.

Bracing myself for the next adventure in what was becoming an increasingly odd business, I opened the door. Then I paused to examine the blank wall of the hallway across from me before I heard a cough and looked down.

It was a small man, leaning on a short wooden walking cane. He was compact in both body and features and stood no more than four feet from the tips of his jet black boots to the top of his fedora. For the whole of that, however, he was immaculate; a dark suit, somewhat antique in its style, gathered to the point below his chin where it pressed a purple cravat into a small rose of colour. Tied beneath his chin was the cord to a black cape which he wore – again with no little sense of style – as easily as I would wear something in transparent lycra. The outfit was topped off by the aforementioned hat, which he had tilted with a slant that reminded me of Alfred Lord Tennyson when he was feeling particularly malicious and in no mood of rhyming.

Facially, the man resembled a hairless dwarf, with a broad overextended nose and downcast mouth. His eyes sagged in little unpleasant pockets of flesh while his mouth was encumbered by lips whose thickness dragged them down into what I imagined was a perpetual frown. Even his chin seemed to have been relegated to become the upper part of his neck, and his neck part of his upper chest.

‘You are Dale?’ he asked with an accent which was very evidently English.

‘Chip Dale,’ I replied coolly after deciding that no matter how much I admired the man’s style, I did not like his tone. His voice was also disturbingly deep for so small a frame.

‘I believe you have taken possession of a goat?’ he said as he proceeded to remove a large purple handkerchief from his pocket and wipe his nose. ‘I believe that you have commandeered a member of the genus Capra which does not belong to you.’

I had an urge to close the door on him right there and then. I don’t take to being spoken down to – or being spoken up to, if you see what I mean…

‘And who are you?’ I asked.

He sneered, revealing small teeth that might have been filed to sharp little points.

‘My name is not important,’ he said. ‘I am merely here about the goat of which, I am led to understand, you have a current excess to the amount of one.’

‘Tell me your name or I close this door right now.’

‘Very well,’ he said, shifting the cape over his shoulder. ‘My name is Fitzfulke. Hector Fitzfulke. I am an associate of your neighbour, Ms. Tunpipe.’

‘And I suppose you’re the fiend that painted a star on poor Archibald’s back?’

‘What if I am?’ he asked, more haughtily than I can write it. ‘Is it wrong for a man to express his religion of choice in the ways dictated to him by the articles of his faith?’

‘Listen,’ I said, stretching to my highest inch. ‘It’s all well and good singing the odd hymn or organising the occasional bingo night, but I don’t hold with slapping emulsion on animals in the name of the Gods of the Underworld. Have you no shame? And where did you get that blood?’

‘I don’t see why I should tell you,’ he replied, stretching himself to the top of his own highest inch. ‘You are interfering with strong forces that lie beyond your understanding. I warn you, Mr. Dale. Do not cross swords with men who have powerful friends.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘You can consider it a brief précis of the situation. I have come for the goat and if you refuse to hand it over…’ He traced a shape in the air with his cane. ‘Let us just say, Mr. Dale, that if you do not present me with that animal, matters shall be taken to a higher…’ Here, he laughed at some conceit. ‘Or should I say, a lower authority…’

‘Little man,’ I said, now irritated by his manner. ‘Do your worst. I’ve a good mind to report you to the RSPCA. Let’s see how they deal with your idea of faith.’

My words seemed to have no effect on him. He merely blinked once before leaning his cane against the door frame as his left hand came out from under his cape. He opened his fingers to reveal a small tin box in the centre of his palm.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

Again, he didn’t answer but brought his other hand up and lifted the lid of the box to reveal a dark brown powder. He took a small amount in the fingers of his hand and thrust it up his nostril.

‘Snuff?’ I said, finding it odd that I’d never seen the stuff taken in all my life.

‘Special snuff,’ he said and with that and a malicious smirk pulled across his lips, blew onto his hand to send a cloud of the infernal power into my face.

‘Consider the goat,’ he said and turned on his heels before I had chance to offer a word, or, more precisely, a sneeze. My eyes were watering as I closed the door and stumbled my way back into the living room.

‘What’s that on your face?’ asked Gabby, half laughing.

‘A mysterious powder thrown into my face by a cape wearing dwarf,’ I explained before I shook the room with a violent sneeze.

‘Don’t be silly,’ she answered. ‘What is it? Really? Chip?’

But by then I’d collapsed on the floor. The goat came across and began to lick my face but to my mind, poisoned by whatever power or powder the man had used on me, the goat has become a manifestation of evil itself. It had the torso of a goat and the body of Dale Winton who was warning me in a light chatty voice about fighting a war that could not be won.

I was more than grateful when I felt the whispering silence of unconsciousness fall over me.

The Long Bank Holiday

There was the promise I’d made myself that my weekend would be quiet. Then there was the reality…

Months of stripping, studying, travelling, writing, and dancing, had finally brought the Chipster lower than a midget mud wrestling pit. He was lower than I’ve known him in a long time. Even his weekend thong hung limply around his lithe waist. He needed a break from the world and all of its troubles. He needed to stop wiggling his hips for just a few days and give his genitalia a few moments alone. He needed, in other words, a bank holiday.

Saturday provided a moderate salve to the great man’s troubled nerves. He relaxed, began to read ‘She’ by H. Rider Haggard, and occasionally looked up to see which team had gone down in the various struggles against relegation. Much the same pattern had been repeated on Sunday, which he spent sat in his favourite armchair and watching Chelsea lose their Premiership crown in an exciting 1-1 draw with Arsenal.

Sunday night, Gabby woke me up. I’d knocked myself out after overdosing on an episode of 'Antiques Roadshow' followed by the snooker.

‘Chip! Come quick,’ she urged. ‘You must come see this…’

And just like that she was out of the room, faster than a thong can snap.

I threw on a bathrobe and walked casually to the door, unwilling to raise my heartbeat for anything or anyone.

Outside in the corridor, I found Gabby kneeling over a young goat which she was rubbing around its beard and forcing to lick her face by pushing her chin to its muzzle. The last time I’d seen her so excited was backstage at the Christmas panto when I’d caught her rubbing Jeremy Beadle’s beard in a similar fashion. I shuddered as I remembered how I’d been forced to save the poor man from licking her face too.

‘Isn’t he adorable?’ she said, looking at me with a face glistening with animal moisture.

‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘No, no, no, no, no…’

‘No?’

‘You’re not bringing that in to my flat,’ I said and tightened the belt around my robe as though I was tightening my resolve. ‘You’ve got to learn that you can’t go buying every animal that takes your fancy, believing you’ll find it lodgings with Wales’ number one male exotic dancer. What would the neighbours think?’

‘But it’s not mine,’ she protested and then looked at me sourly. ‘You’ll never forget that Jeremy Beadle incident, will you?’

The fact is that I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. But that’s not what had me stumped.

‘Not yours?’ I repeated, having assumed that any stray animal that turns up in North Wales is somehow linked to Romania’s answer to Gerald Durrell.

She spluttered her laughter. ‘What would I do with goat?’

It was a question I thought best not to answer.

‘So what’s it doing here?’ I asked, looking down the row of doors leading to the other flats on our level.

‘I think he escaped from market,’ she said. ‘Poor thing must have come looking to keep warm.’ She turned the animal around. ‘You see farmer’s mark?’ she said and pointed to its back. ‘Must mean the poor thing was going to be sold.’ This only precipitated another round of muzzle licking which, to be honest, was not pretty to look at.

I turned my attention to the flanks of the animal and what looked like star drawn in a deep red marker pen.

A cold draft welled up my professional channels.

‘Bring it inside,’ I muttered. ‘I don’t think we should discuss this sort of thing in the open.’

Gabby face lit up and she quickly herded the goat into the flat. I was glad to get the door closed.

‘But why draw star on goat?’ asked Gabby as she settled with the animal before the fireplace. ‘In Romanian, we write lot numbers for the auction…’

But I was too busy inspecting the animal to answer.

‘That looks remarkably like a pentagram,’ I finally said as I ran my hand over the shape. The ink was still wet and on close inspection didn’t so much look like ink as it resembled congealed blood.

‘This is blood,’ I said when the realisation struck me.

She hung her hands on his hips and frowned at me.

‘You fooling? You fooling with poor Gabby? What reason somebody draw star in blood on little goat?’

I said the words that had been bothering me since I’d seen the shape on the animal out in the hall. ‘Devil worship?’

Gabby fell silence. I would have even sworn that the room temperature dropped but I looked down to see that my robe had fallen open again.

‘This animal has been taking part in some dark ritual,’ I explained. ‘It’s managed to escape from some coven of Satanists. Who knows what evil uses this poor animal’s blood might have been put. A real-life version of Rosemary’s Baby might be taking place in this very building.’

I didn’t have time to complete that thought. At that very moment, there was a loud knock on the door.

I refastened my gown and went to door.

It was Mrs. Tunpipe from two flats along. She’s a heavy set woman, more girth than height, who works at one of the local universities. The high colour of her cheeks distracts somewhat from the pitch black bonnet of hair that lies thickly across her head. It makes her look like a spent match, though the analogy doesn’t like up to the reality. Unlike a spent match, Mrs. Tunpipe can flare and then flair again...

‘Ah, Mr. Dale,’ she snapped somewhat skittishly. ‘I was wondering if you’ve noticed a young goat wandering around?’

‘A goat, Mrs. Tunpipe? Why would a goat be wandering around?’

‘None of your business why it’s running around. If you’ve not seen him then I won’t be keeping you.’

‘No, no, I can’t say that I have seen a goat,’ I lied. ‘I’d remember if I had. Don’t often see goats wandering around these days.’

At that moment, Gabby gave a squeal followed by a loud bleat.

‘Archibald!’ cried Mrs Tunpipe and elbowed her way into the flat.

I caught up with her as she breached the main room.

‘Look here,’ I said grabbing her arm. ‘You can’t go barging into somebody’s flat uninvited.’

She pointed the goat which was now in Gabby’s arms. ‘You’ve stolen my goat,’ she said. ‘Give him back!’

I fixed her with my most inquisitive eye. ‘Your goat, Mrs. Tunpipe?’

‘Yes, he’s my goat,’ she replied. ‘And I demand that you hand him over.’

‘You not taking goat!’ said Gabby from floor.

‘He’s my goat,’ replied Mrs. Tunpipe. ‘You have no right to keep him here.’

‘And you have no right to sacrifice him to dark lord of underworld,’ answered my Romanian angel.

Mrs. Tunpipe’s face darkened. ‘Don’t go sticking your nose in what doesn’t concern you,’ she said and turned to me. ‘You might tell your little illegal visitor to our shores that we believe in privacy laws in this country and you can’t go stealing other people’s property.’

‘I don’t believe they were drawn up so you can practise dark masses in rented accommodation,’ I answered.

Crimson flooded her cheeks. ‘Then this is not the last you’ll hear of this,’ she hissed and turned to the door. ‘But I warn you now, Mr. Dale. The next time you hear a knock, don’t be surprised who you discover has come to visit.’

She left us with the front door shaking the pictures on the walls. Archibald the goat gave another bleat.

‘Well, that’s that,’ I said, looking to Gabby. ‘When Satan comes calling, you can answer the door. I won't be here.'

'Why?' she asked. 'Where are you going?'

I paused at the bedroom door. 'I'm going back to work.'

'But what about your holiday? I thought you needed a break.'

I looked at the goat. 'That's a small sacrifice I'm willing to pay,' I replied, leaving the ambiguity of the words hanging in the space between us.

Love Me, Love My Thong

Hot damn! The Chipster got up this morning and looked in the mirror. Jealous already? Of course you are… Not for the first time lately, I thought to myself: my God, Chip old son, you’re looking bloody handsome today! And you can’t deny it. Those of you who have seen me in the flesh recently will know I’m hotter than a rabid Spice Girl. I bring tears to the eyes quicker than a well lubricated onion. I put the triple X back into sexxxy.

I’m beginning to think that aging suits me. It’s giving me that unmistakable bearing of breeding, which I’m told is more attractive to the ladies than a midget millionaire. Age seems to be suiting me like it seems to suit my lookalike, the Lib Dem’s Welsh spokesman. You might have caught a glimpse of Lembit in the paper the other day, playing ping pong with his own less sexy version of Gabby Romanian. (I should add that the picture to your right is not the one showing Lembit playing ping pong. Or if it is, it's a strange Romanian version not well known to those of us new to the sport.)

There might be a few years between us and poor Lembit hasn’t got my body – though who has? – but he still looks pretty damn sexy. How the man’s not landed a modelling contract with M&S, I really can’t fathom. Perhaps they can use him instead of Bryan ‘The Fuhrer’ Ferry. If only the man could train his body, he'd be the perfect human: looks, brains, as well as brawn. The others photos I saw of him playing around the pool left me feeling quite jealous. It perhaps accounts for my having just come back from the local Argos where I bought myself a ping pong table.

Ping pong. Don’t you just love saying those words? Ping pong. Ping pong. Ping pong. And wouldn’t the world be a better place if we left it to the Chinese to name everything? Running out and buying the table was a bit rash. This flat wasn’t built for a ping pong. I mean, why do you think China’s so big in the first place? Gabby also had a fit when she saw me with a ping pong paddle in my hand. She thought I’d taken a job taxiing aircraft. After all was calm, we spent half an hour dabbling in the finer arts of spin and ball control. I managed to grind her weak forehand into the dirt for all its worth.

I’m now taking a breather before I dismantle the table and take it back to the shop. Romania has never been a great ping pong playing nation. Neither has Wales. I've come the conclusion that both of our peoples should just stick to what we’re so good at: and that’s looking so hot and bloody sexy.

Golf Moobs

I was watching the coverage of the Masters from Augusta when Gabby got back from the off license. After she’d finished emptying her crates of brown ale and arranging her bottles in the refrigerator, she threw herself down onto the sofa and together we admired Tiger Wood’s putting strokes. I was too wrapped up in the ebb and flow of the competition to notice that Gabby’s eyebrows were slowly coming together like two squirrels set to begin a reluctant joust. The first thing I knew of her quizzical look was when she turned to me and asked, ever so earnestly, why ‘Big Jugs Monty’ wasn’t playing.

I admit that I was a little big taken aback. ‘Big Jugs Monty’? I don’t know where she hears these things but she certainly doesn’t hear them from me. Man breasts – or ‘moobs’ as I think they’re now called – are no laughing matter. Being blessed with perfectly formed pectorals, myself, I don’t see any point in making fun of men who are cursed with that form of buxomness deemed unacceptable in this age of the plastically pert nipple.

Or at least that’s what I told Gabby who proceeded to lecture me at even greater length that in Romania male breasts are considered a sigh of great virility and that she was only watching the golf in order to catch Colin Montgomery in action. Apparently, the reason he’s so sexy to Romanian eyes is linked to the reason why Norman Wisdom is considered big in Albania. There, shortness of stature is considered sexy, as are clumsiness and flat caps worn askance.

I had no reply. I carried on watching the golf, left slightly subdued by the knowledge that my well oiled flat chest actually stands for nothing in the land of the magnificent moob.

Bye Bye G4

Gabby’s in the bedroom crying into her pillow. She’s just heard that G4 are to split up. I’m sitting in my den with a huge grin on my face and listening to Kris Kristofferson growl his way through ‘Beat the Devil’.

One of Gabby’s ambitions since arriving in the country had been to terrorise the nation with a duet with G4, bless her poor little perverted Romanian heart. I hear the reason for the split is 'creative differences'. Two of G4 wanted to create something evil and the others only wanted to create something mildly demonic.

News like this makes a man's thong swell with delight!

I ain't sayin' I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing.