I don't know if they do one of these in Welsh, but there's an English Test you try which will tell you how English you are. (Hat tip: The Daily Referendum)
I managed to score 96% -- I got only one wrong by not knowing Charles Dickens' middle names -- which can't be bad for somebody still recovering from an hour less in bed. Does that make me an honorary Welshman or an honorary Englishman? I really don't know.
So now I’m sitting at the computers in my local library on a Saturday afternoon here in Bangor. But if you’re wondering why I’m wearing a raincoat and glasses, it’s a bit of long story. Let’s just say that I needed to make contact with you but I had to wear a disguise if I wanted to get here unmolested.
I guess I had an inkling that it was going to be a funny day when I had to sneak out of the house. It makes me feel even more like Michael Caine in one of those Harry Palmer films. I believe we’re now meant to have some innocuous exchange where I ask: ‘When do Bulgarian hamsters eat cheese?’ To which you must respond with: ‘I don’t know but have a ham sandwich instead.’
Since you're probably wondering, I’ve still not found my laptop's power supply , though Gabby now swears that she hasn’t hid it. That means I’ve left it somewhere and I go cold at that possibility.
You see, last night, instead of staying in, I went to my local coffee shop where I spent an hour writing this week’s assignment for my English course. Mrs. Rust has asked us to write about some skill we lack. I’d contemplated writing a piece about Ray ‘Truncheon’ Peter’s reverse thong heel flip, which has always been something of a mystery to me, but in the end I wrote something much more thoughtful. I intended to post it here before I hand it in, but since it’s on the laptop, I’ll need to find juice before I can upload it and you can give me my marks.
And that brings me back to the power supply. At the moment, it's all of my worries. I think I might have left it at the coffee shop. The same coffee shop where, last night, I had a rather odd experience.
The trouble began when somebody recognized me.
I was happily typing away when I was approached by a young woman with stunning black hair. She was the type of young willowy beauty heavily into the Gothic and bearing more than a passing resemblance to Amy Winehouse. Her eye liner as thick as her lips which were like two ripe purple slugs, though I confess that this probably doesn’t do her any justice. She would undoubtedly appeal to the undead. I just felt not a little afraid.
‘Aren’t you Chip Dale?’ she asked.
I said I was and she clapped her hands together like some well-trained sea lion. I felt an urge to throw her some fish. Dead, of course.
‘I thought you were,’ she said. ‘I saw you in the paper and I’ve been reading you blog. I think you’re wonderful.’
‘Do you? Oh... well... I’m really delighted,’ I said. I’ve never had a fan who hasn’t seen me naked, so I was taken back by this enthusiastic approach. Somebody who likes me for more than my thong. It’s a rare thing.
‘I know this will make you laugh,’ she carried on, ‘but I was just amazed by how much you resemble Lembit Opik.’
I should have known there was a catch. ‘Did you,’ I said, rather naively. I still didn’t expect the catch to be as big as the one that was about to come.
‘Oh, I did,’ replied the girl. ‘When the judge told me that I couldn’t follow him around any more, I didn’t know what to do. Until I saw you. You were the answer to my prayers.’
It was one of those sentences that I could spend an hour examining and still find more things about it which disturb me. I finally settled on just one.
‘The judge?’ I repeated.
She barked a loud abrasive laugh and pulled up a chair before sitting herself down beside me and casually grabbing my leg.
‘What you writing?’ she asked, squeezing my knee.
‘Work,’ I whispered, my voice achieving what my body couldn't: disappearing in a flash. ‘You were telling me about the judge.’
Again with the laugh. Her hand moved north.
‘Oh, that was a while ago,’ she said. ‘I’ve not breached that restraining once. I mean, how good am I?’ She smiled at me again and took the opportunity of brushing a few invisible crumbs from my shirt to handle my nipples. ‘You’re cute,’ she added and rolled up a sleeve to reveal a tattoo of the honourable MP for Montgomeryshire riding what looked like a large snake.
‘Am I?’ I asked as I tried to decipher the tattoo.
‘Nearly as cute as Lembit but you’ve got prospects.’
‘Have I?’
‘You have,’ she said
‘Such as?’ I know I shouldn't have encouraged her.
She giggled. ‘The prospect that you’re going to take off your clothes for me.’
I gave a slight scream and snapped shut the lid of my laptop.
‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I’ve got pancakes in the oven.’
‘Oh, don’t leave,’ cried my fan. ‘I won’t let you go until you tell me when I can come and see you perform.’
I pulled my leg from her grip and ran from the shop.
The last thing I heard was her sweet voice above the sound of the coffee grinders.
‘I’ll be saving all my five pound notes for you. I want to slip them down your thong!’
Which is why I’m in disguise and why I think I’ll have to go and find a shop to sell me a new power supply. I’ve suddenly gone right off coffee and girls who look like Amy Winehouse.
An example of Romanian wit is to hide a man's power supply to his laptop. I've spent the morning looking for it and my battery is down to 10%. I'll post once I attach more mains power to this machine.
If you heard tortured screams of dread anguish during the night, I don’t want you to worry. It was only me.
A Romanian uprising took place late last night and the flames of have only recently died down. It all began when Gabby decided that she wanted to start posting things on my blog.
I was sitting watching ‘Oh Lucky Man’ on Sky Cinema, when an arm suddenly appeared under my nose. As you can probably imagine, my upper lip is not usually the place to find arms, so to say I was a little taken aback is something of an understatement. However, I was less surprised to find a hand attached to the arm and that’s when I recognised the half dozen rings decorating the fingers. It was Gabby’s hand and it was holding a piece of paper that looked suspiciously like the flyleaf from my new copy of Auden’s poems.
I swallowed the large sob that had somehow developed in my throat.
‘Chippy, read,’ she said, or, more accurately, demanded. ‘Chippy: read!’ is more like it, I suppose. The colon is so very Romanian.
So, I read aloud from the piece of paper with the emblem of Faber & Faber still visible at the bottom of the page.
‘Hiya lovelinks! My name’s Gabby and I’m Romanian songbird and I sing songs in a band with my gorgeous sister and we make gorgeous pop music for the people in London who sell our records until we get to number seven in the pop charts doing the hokey cokey for the lovely ladies and gentlemen of the UK of England…’
There was some more about recording contracts, double decker buses, animal mutilations, but I think you get the picture. The point is: I knew at once that I had to save you. I had to take a bullet for each person who comes by this blog and expects to read undiluted Welshman. Which I did without hesitation.
I suggested that she get her own blog. I told her that she should get her own website, where she could put audio clips of her singing. I told her that she could sell tshirts with her picture on. And then I told her that people come here for thong news and they might not even like the hokey cokey. That really wasn’t the wisest thing to say. My lips kissed ring but it certainly wasn’t papal. There was then a row, then tears, and then some brooding stand-off near the knife draw.
Eventually, around one o’clock, I thought the danger had passed so I went to bed, nursing my thick lip, and leaving Gabby sitting under the kitchen table and knocking back her potato moonshine.
The sound of snipping woke me around four in the morning.
It was Gabby sitting in the bedroom cupboard and cutting up my thongs with a large pair of paper shears. Naturally, I screamed. That’s probably the noise you heard if you live anywhere on the 53rd parallel. Gabby screamed back and threw the shears at me. Luckily, I ducked and they passed straight through the plasterboard wall.
She then threw a thong at me but I had already got to her before she could do any real damage. A dozen pairs of summer thongs were ruined but that’s really nothing to a man who owns thousands. I was more concerned with what she could have done and I’ve vowed to keep my collection under lock and key from now on.
This morning she was as bright as marmalade, fully of apologies, and blamed a bad brew of
spud shine. She also announced that she didn’t think she needed a website as her career’s already better than mine.
‘Keep your bloody blog, Chippy,’ she said with one of those wide honest warm hearted Romanian smiles. ‘You keep your bloody blog and I keep BBC Top of the Pops.’
I hadn’t the heart to tell her that they cancelled Top of the Pops six months ago and that it was widely rumoured that she was one of the reasons.
Everything was neatly wrapped up when the neighbour came around a delivered a pair of paper shears he said he’d found sticking in his kitchen door this morning. He’d noticed my name on them and wondered if they belonged to me. I explained the whole thing and I should imagine the smile he had as he walked away was not a little feeling of being blessed.
Which is also how I hope you feel on this fine March morning.
Thong on.
I’ve just got back after a day hogging the limelight here in Bangor. This morning, The Bangor Post finally ran an interview I did with them a few months ago. I knew nothing about it until this morning when the neighbour came knocking on the door and asked that I autograph his copy. Since them, I've signed hundreds of papers as I casually loitered in the town centre.
The story isn't exactly front page stuff (instead, they've led with Brown's budget and its impact on the town) but it is, nevertheless, a nice profile.
Anyway, I’ve scanned it and posted for you all to admire (click it to read it in full). Gabby says I look a bit menacing in the photo they've used and though I have to agree that I don’t exactly look my best, I think you can tell I was at a physical peak when it was taken. It also manages to hide my flowing locks.
You might also wonder about the lack of a thong in the photo. I'm disappointed too. They refused to photograph me wearing one on account of it being a family newspaper. I think you can see that I had to wrap a towel around my lower half. Not that I was going to complain too much. It was a cold day when they took that photo and I don't mind admitting that there was plenty of slack in my thong.
Finally, I'd ask you to ignore all the talk about my going in politics. This was interview was done some months ago and I went cold on the idea once the last Lib Dem conference rejected the thong motion I'd been supporting. If another party could adopt it, I might reconsider my position. Until then, I'm afraid to say that politics is not for The Chipster.
‘How big is a blue tit?’
I really don’t know but somebody came by this website today to find out. Why am I telling you this, you might ask? Well, you might say that I’m just a little bored tonight. I should really be off out soon, performing at the Green Dragon. Instead, I’m here in the flat perusing my web statistics.
I’m not normally a man to go on about his visitor numbers but today’s have been appalling. Has the world been too busy watching the budget to care about the state of Welsh thongdom? I’m beginning to wonder if it’s something I’ve said. Is it these Auden poems I’ve been quoting lately? Whatever it is, it seems to be turning people away.
Not for the first time, it's made me consider giving up blogging and taking up some other hobby. I could have made myself a fine spice rack if I’d taken carpentry at night school…
Bored, bored, bored, and ignored by all…
Which is why I’ve decided that I’m going to get myself a theme song. It's something I've been missing for a while. I want a tuneful tune that makes you think of the nation’s top thongster whenever you hear it played. I’d like to automatically start playing whenever you come and visit this blog, though I’ve been told that’s not possible and is considered poor net etiquette. Instead, I’ll simply have to adopt it as the official Chipster anthem to be used only on ceremonial occasions.
As to the music, ‘The Stripper’ is too obvious Ideally it would a song with the word ‘thong’ in the title but I don’t know any. I’m quite tempted to adopt the following tune, ‘Florida Fantasy’ from Midnight Cowboy.
I could have gone for ‘Everybody’s Talkin’’ but that’s too well known and my favourite track from the film is the theme song itself. The only reason stopping me confirming this song here and now is that I’m not sure I want to be associated with a film about a New York hustler. Then again, what are my alternatives?
‘Thongs For The Memories’ by Bob Hope?
‘The Munchkin Thong’ from Wizard of Oz?
‘Thong You Very Much…’ by The Scaffold?
‘Thong Sung Blue’ by Neil Diamond?
Or perhaps just ‘G Strings from Amsterdam’ by Max Bygraves…
Budget day is a much revered time in the Dale household. It’s why I’ve locked myself away in the bedroom. Gabby is out there right now, watching the BBC’s coverage and lusting over David Dimbleby. She has certain feelings towards that man which aren’t totally legal. You might scoff but she keeps a picture of him in her handbag and I swear I’ve overheard conversations she’s had with her cousins where they discuss mini vans, electrical tape, and bottles of chloroform. They usually end with her advising them to rewatch The King of Comedy.
To be honest, I can’t see the appeal. In the budget, that is... not David Dimbleby. Heaven knows the man’s a magnet irrespective of your gender. However, stripping hasn’t provided me much of a mind for figures. If I’m totally honest, my interest in politics is somewhat limited. I read very few political blogs and none that deal with local politics. Belisha beacons outside Bangor’s high school and the date of this year’s church raffle aren’t things that interest me. I’m damn sure they aren’t going to fill you with the good feelings either, so I spare you the details here at Chipster Central. If it isn’t thong related, I try to spare you the details.
The same goes for economics. I care not a jot where you put the decimal point, nor how many units you carry over. Don’t speak to me of trends, of curves, of accumulated interest because my own interest will immediately decline into the red. There’s a 99% chance, + or – my not giving a damn, that I’m political eunuch. Which perhaps explains why I pin the Lib Dem colours to my door. It’s a vote for not having to vote.
Gabby is quite different. She still has that East European love with capitalism and there’s nothing she wouldn’t do to earn a few pounds. She’s still a bit touchy about the BBC rejecting her application to go on The Apprentice and has written many letters of appeal to Dimbleby.
None of this is originally what I came into the bedroom to blog about but that will have to wait for another time. Gabby’s screaming at the television in vulgar Romanian. It seems that they’ve gone over to Westminster and Dimbleby’s gone from the screen.
In the end, I’m glad I struggled to my adult learning class this afternoon. It was one of those funny episodes that can easily cheer up an aging thongman’s week.
Mrs. Rust began the lesson by taking the register. There were twelve us in class this week and mine was the second name to be read out. When she’d finished, Mrs. Rust closed the register and the first thing she did was turn to ask me about the best way to treat a fungal toe infection. What could I say? I had no way to avoid the question and so, in my guise as a chartered manicurist, I tried to answer her the best I could.
I should never have lied last week about what I do for a living. I’m useless at pretending to be something I’m not. Which is perhaps why I nearly gave the game away when I suggested that a cure might involve, as a last remedy, the surgical removal of the infected toe.
‘You’d recommend the amputation of a toe in a case of athlete’s foot?’ she asked, shocked to the last twist of her already grey hair.
‘Oh,’ I said, loudly so the rest of the class could be sure of my authority in this matter, ‘that’s only in the rarest instances. Grown men have been known to lose legs when athlete’s foot has gone untreated for too long.’
Well, she fell silent for a few moments before she started the lesson. I thought I’d got away with my sham but I soon realised that she doubted my story when she announced that we’d be reading the Auden poem which begins ‘At least the secret is out’.
At Last the Secret is Out
At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end,
The delicious story is ripe to tell to tell to the intimate friend;
Over the tea-cups and into the square the tongues has its desire;
Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links,
Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks,
Under the look of fatigue the attack of migraine and the sigh
There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
For the clear voice suddenly singing, high up in the convent wall,
The scent of the elder bushes, the sporting prints in the hall,
The croquet matches in summer, the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
There is always a wicked secret, a private reason for this.
We silently read the poem a couple of times before we went though it as a class, but it didn’t take long before Mrs. Rust began to ask me some very odd questions.
‘What kind of secret story might be “delicious”, Chip?’
‘Why do you think it’s the lady who dances and the man who drinks, Chip? Wouldn’t it have been a better secret if it were the other way around? Why might a man want to keep it a secret that he likes to dance?’
‘Do men always have a wicked secret, Chip?’
After half an hour of this, it had all became a bit embarrassing and I’m sure the rest of the class were beginning to suspect that some hidden meaning lay behind all these innuendos.
In the end I could take it no longer when she asked: ‘Do you think men keep secrets because they’re ashamed, Chip?’
‘Ashamed?’ I answered. ‘Ashamed! There’s no shame!’
And with that I jumped up on the desk.
It was quite a sight to see. Even with a bad back, I began to grind my hips as I started my world famous inverted thong strip.
‘Is there anything to feel shameful when you’ve got a body like this?’ I asked as I began my routine by revealing my magnificent torso. ‘Is there anything to be shamed about when you’re Chip Dale, Bangor’s most famous Thonglateer Extraordinaire?’ And with that I did my patented hip thrust that usually drives the ladies crazy.
Of course, I didn’t give them the full strip. There were women in that room who were there to read Jane Austen, but I was down to my underwear when Mrs. Rust brought the class to order.
‘Thank you for setting us straight, Chip,’ said Mrs. Rust with a knowing smile on her face.
The class roared their disapproval as my impromptu performance came to an end and I settled myself back in my chair, suddenly feeling like I was Mrs. Rust’s star pupil.
‘You never struck me as a man who understands toes,’ Mrs. Rust explained as she waited for the room to fall silent. ‘Not with hips are as lean as a Shakespearean sonnet and thighs with all the meaty presence of a novel by Sir Walter Scott.’ And with that she opened her book of poems. ‘Now, Chip, what can you tell me something about this poem’s rhyme scheme?’
I’m just one large blogging genital tonight, so I have to ask you to forgive me. It’s late, I’m typing this in the nude, and I just don’t see why I should go and slip on a thong after office hours. And if you’re in any way ashamed of my body, then look away now. I’m about to untangle myself and you might not think it a pretty sight.
There, that’s better… Now you can look again.
Not that I don’t find this a little off putting myself. I’m lying in bed with the laptop balanced on a pillow (I’ve seen the damage that can be done so I’m not risking PC / loin contact). The TV sits at the foot of the bed and is tuned to BBC News 24 from where Baroness Amos is currently gazing up between my thighs. I imagine this is what it will be like when the government introduce cavity searches but I can’t say I care for it all that much. It doesn’t matter how many I’ve got naked in front of a crowd, I don’t think I could ever get use to Baroness Amos peering up between my naked thighs. At the very least it takes my mind of what I’m doing and at the worst I’m sure it’s unconstitutional. Besides, I’ve seen the damage that can be done so I’m not risking Amos / loin contact either.
Anyway, the reason I’m working so late is that I’ve been nominated for a Thogger.
You might want to read that again.
When I got the call, I mistakenly thought it was a ‘Thonger’, which, as you probably know, is the highest accolade in world stripping. No UK stripper has yet won a Thonger, let along a chap from Wales. I thought my life was about to change for the better and I’d become the world ambassador to the world’s exhibitionists, gyrators, lap dancers, and thonglateers. You can imagine my disappointment when Gabby pointed out that it said Thogger, not Thonger.
That’s the problem with these Romanians. They’re so perceptive.
After I’d finished crying, I reread the citation and discovered that Trixy considers that I’m a blogger who makes her think. Think about what, you probably wonder? Well I think it’s probably not a good idea to ask. I try my best, of course, but I never seem to become anything more than a man in thong. I sometimes wonder if an education will come to nothing unless I mention my private parts every hundred words. If I gave you a choice between lots of observations about my wang or something insightful about Auden, I suspect the wang would win every time. Which is typical of the British mentality. I’m also sure Auden wrote a poem about it as he had a similar problem.
So, what does this Thogger award mean? It means that I get to nominate five lucky people to whom I send this mixed blessing. Earlier this evening, I put all the candidates into a hat – or actually an old pair of Y fronts with an abnormally large crotch – and these are the winners that came out smelling slightly of oil and unction.
1. Blockhead Magazine
2. Rilly Super
3. Mutterings and Meanderings
4. Arthur Clewley
5. Mr. Joe Blogs
5b. Baroque in Hackney
Congratulations, to all five of you. You really do make me think. And hard luck to the other nominees who also make me think but who didn't have the rub of the Y fronts this time. Your turn will surely come as the electoral Y fronts are remarkably roomy and fair in its selections.
I took in a new delivery of thermal thongs on Saturday but I’ve not had chance to inspect them. My mind has been too busy with the practicalities of building a home on a desert island.
Perhaps I should explain...
I’ve taken a couple of days away from both blogging and baby oil. Last week you might recall that my doctor told me to rest until my back began to feel better. Since I’ve had a busy few weeks, what with my trip to America, I took my doctor’s orders as my chance to take a break from the everyday struggles of maintaining a body fit for gyrating. That's why I kept to my bed where I’ve been reading ‘The Mysterious Island’ by Jules Verne. It has been a blissful weekend.
You might remember that in Washington, I discovered Jules Verne after my encounter with 'Bill' and his naked party guests. I'd holed myself up in my hotel room with a copy of ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’ which I’d found in the lobby.
I finished that book on the flight back to the UK and immediately ordered another Verne classic from Amazon. Now I think it's time I proselytized about Verne and give him my fantastic Book Thong of the Month award for March.
‘The Mysterious Island’ is the story of five men (and their dog) who get stranded on a tropical island and it describes how they turn the island into a home. It’s probably not for everybody and I’m only on page 300, but I’m loving every page where the practical application of science is gradually transforming the island into something weird and wonderful. You see, so much that happens in the book involves turning natural resources into the things we take for granted. It’s an adventure of chemistry, physics, and human ingenuity much more than it’s a story about conflict between people. If you want to read a book where somebody makes nitrogycerine out of a couple of coconut shells, this is the book for you.
Now my back is feeling a little better, I’ll have to read fifty pages here and there as I have work to do. But if you’re going to take one book recommendation from a male stripper this month, make it ‘The Mysterious Island’.
