Fear and Trembling

There’s a time in the day, for usually about eight thirty in the morning, when the mind is most receptive to bad news. It’s usually before my first drink, when my body’s juices are at their lowest and no amount of effort can get them flowing. That’s why I usually turn on the TV as soon as I wake up. I give myself over to what Kirkegaard would have called ‘the strength of the absurd’. And of course it doesn't do any harm in helping to drown out the sound of a certain Romanian who snores like a bison.

I’m fanatical about knowing the day’s headlines. Knowing how much worse the world has got while I was asleep allows me to decide if I’m going to go through the day fearing something large and unimaginably evil.

Which makes it a bit odd that I head straight for something large and unimaginably evil.

Murdoch owns Sky News but it’s still the first channel I seek out, though these days, perhaps for nothing more than my notorious infatuation with Kay Burley. I find my sympathies towards Sky are lessening with each passing week. They have become too caught up in an endless cycle (or should that be recycle) of the same four or five stories. Which is why I usually then turn on BBC News 24.

The BBC might have their bias but at least it’s varied bias.

Then it’s onto the minor channels, which includes the best news channel of all. EuroNews should come with a guarantee that you’ll see something there that won’t have seen anywhere else. Unfortunately, most of it’s in French and they have too many pieces about Belgium street artists but I do enjoy the variety.

Which brings me on to my point.

Irrespective of the channel, today’s headlines were all about bird flu. It put pay to my usual hard-boiled breakfast. It was Alpen and a freshly squeezed orange for me this morning. Yet as I was chewing my mouthful the sawdust and berries, I began to realise how much of my fear was put there by the media.

The difficult bit about fear is that it happily fills the huge gulf that sits between ‘possibility’ and ‘actuality’. It’s that great imagined somewhere were we get struck by asteroids, the Chinese decide to invade, or Simply Red decide to bring their tour to Bangor. I suppose it’s an indulgence of people who don’t live with the immediacy of a real threat. I can’t imagine what it was to live in London during the Blitz with the real chance of sitting under a bomb sights. What should happen if Mick Hucknall decided to take the flat above?

But I guess we don’t know until it happens. And we can’t know. We shouldn’t know. And people shouldn’t make us feed our fear so they can also provide it’s tonic in the form of hours and hours of reassurance.

For the moment, we should live our life taking some comfort from the insanity of it all. Hucknall probably wouldn’t be able to find Bangor on a map of North Wales. And I should live happy with that fact and the million others they never tell me on the news.

Late Update

It’s 3AM and I’ve just got in. It’s been a long day so this will be a short update.

Had a day visiting relatives, which is far more exciting than you can ever know. They think I work as an accountant at a big form of solicitors here in Bangor. I’ve had to spend the whole day trying to steer the conversation away from high finance which they seem to think I’d find interesting. I haven’t the heart to tell them that I wouldn’t know the profit column from a debit column. I could have made a filthy allusion there but I don’t like to play to type, especially when I’m on the wrong side of 3AM.

I’m now off to bed.

A Cadbury’s Cream GDA

The Chipster may have one mighty hell of a great bod, or at least that’s what the softer population of Bangor tell him, but he does have a weakness when it comes to chocolate. I’m a man who just can’t say no to a Cadbury’s Cream egg. It’s my Achilles heel, or at least my Achilles’s molar. I’m like a drunk who’s gone too long without tasting whisky if I go a week without a little chocolate in my diet.

Gabby knows this, bless her vagrant little Romanian heart, which is possibly why she bought me a box of four eggs today and left them on my laptop for when I got back from the gym. Unfortunately, I’d left the power on and I returned home to find that one of the eggs had melted over my brand new laptop. I couldn’t fault Gabby for trying. After all, what’s a Sony Vaio compared to the love of a flexible Romanian?

To keep myself cheerful while I tried to get rapidly hardening chocolate from the keyboard, I thought I’d have one of the three (thank you Casio calculator) remaining eggs. I reached for the box and was about to tuck in when I noticed that a warning had been printed on the front.

‘Be treatwise,’ ts said, ‘get to know your GDAs’.

GDAs?

If you’re like me, you’ll have no idea what a GDA looks like. I had no idea I had even one let alone enough to make them plural. I wouldn’t even know how to sponge them down when I’m in the shower.

So, do I hear you ask, what is a GDA?

After much searching, I discovered that they have nothing to do with The Global Development Alliance, the Greater Dublin Area, the Governor Dummer Academy, or even the Gastroduodenal artery (thanks for nothing Wikipaedia), I visited www.betreatwise.org.uk and found out that it means Guideline Daily Allowance. In practice, this means that a single Cadbury Cream egg contains 28.2% of my daily sugar and 0.8% of my daily salt. I could go one but it would only depress you. I did a bit of thinking about this. A box of four eggs give me all my sugar for the day, but I’d have to eat 125 of the things to get enough salt.

I hope you can see my dilemma. These figures seem to make it difficult in the extreme to find a happy balance between the two.

When I thought about it long enough, I began to get the feeling that I could detect the hand of the government in this warning. They get their fingers in every pie, or in this case, in every cream egg. Once you realise this, you have to say that you just can’t beat them. I may as well put my broad oily shoulders behind the scheme and convert to the GDA.

I’ve rang the man who does my website graphics to make me one that says Chip Dale’s Diary contains 73% of your recommended daily amount of bullspit, 13% of your daily wit and wisdom, and only 2% of your chuckles. I’m considering putting a similar warning on all my thongs. I think my audiences should be warned. This item may contain up to 89% of your daily recommended amount of genital.

After I’d arranged all of this, I realised I no longer wanted my cream egg. I’ve left them out for Gabby. She’s Romanian and as you know, that blessed nation refuse to be ruled by anything that comes in the form of a percentage.

Lucky people.

The Tramp

I don’t like to make light of something that could have so clearly ended up in tragedy, but you have to wonder what the world’s coming to when the man in your corner shop has plans to decapitate somebody just to get a hit video on YouTube. Mind you, I just can’t understand the attraction of these ‘crazy’ videos that seem so popular. In my day, we’d play the odd practical joke, but nothing as serious as a malicious wounding. We might put a firework or two down somebody’s trousers, but that’s as far and as dangerous as it went.

These days, I suppose it has to be something as extreme as decapitation to even make me bat an eyelid. Today, it happened twice. Once with that story and again when Gabby came back home with the tramp.

Sometimes, I wonder how much she really understands this country.

She tells me in Romania it’s a custom to bring a traveller in off the streets, bathe him, give him something to eat, and then send him on his way. All the best villages do it or so she says. It didn’t seem quite right to say no.

His name was Gavin and he was originally from South Wales. Turns out he was a miner too, until times turned rough for him. We had a few interesting conversations. He was fascinated by career in exotic dancing and I asked him about life living rough. He couldn’t speak more highly off it and by the time we’d giving him a bath, he cleaned up a treat.

We sent him off on his way just before we had our supper. I wasn’t for having a tramp living in the house. I have my limits and expensive hi-definition TV set to think about. But if you happen to see a tramp dressed in an old boiler suit that used to form part of a strip act (you can tell by the glittering straps), you might also want to ask him if he’s also wearing a black thong (extra large). If he says he is, then say hello to Gavin. And give him a bath too. You really won’t regret it.

A Stand Up Chipster

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Comedy Club’

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

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

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

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

This is a fairly accurate transcript of what I said:

Good evening, Bangor!

[Polite applause]

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

[Silence]

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

[A solitary whoop from the crowd]

Hey, I will if you will…

[A lonely cheer]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Loud whoop…]

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

[Slightly guilty sniggering]

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, I’m a Liberal Democrat myself.

[Laughter! The first of the evening!]

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

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

Good night.

[Polite applause]

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

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

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

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

Good night.

Odd Jobbing

Well I’m back!

It’s been a long old day, spent fully dressed in crowds, and I’ve not got long to explain what I’ve been up to. Gabby's immigrations officer has given her tickets for the theatre and she thinks it will broaden my tastes to watch some Ibsen. Apparently Ibsen is very big in Romania where he's considered a rioutous laugh much like the French consider Jerry Lewis. To be honest, I’m not really up for a night at the theatre but I am full of hope that Bangor’s Community Theatre Group have the talent to put on a good show. Last year’s panto wasn’t too bad at all and since they so clearly mastered Jack and the Beanstalk, I'm intrigued to see what this Peer Gynt is all about. If it's anything as good as Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor, I think I'm in for a fun packed evening.

And at the very least, I can be sure it will be very different to how I spent my day.

If you’ve seen the news, you’ll have heard about these new security cameras the Home Office are considering installing in Britain’s high streets. You know the things: broad coverage of shoppers, with full zoom and pan functionality, and they can also see through your clothes. Apparently, they’re all the rage abroad.

Well, today was all about The Chipster making a few honest pounds by starring in promotional videos for these cameras. I can’t tell you any inside information except I spent hours dressed in a rather fetching suit and I walking around Birmingham. I went up and down every main street, stood in bus queues, posed as I looked thoughtfully at my watch, signalled taxis, read the newspaper… All the typical actions of your typical commuter/terrorist. All the time, high above, cameras were following me, peeling back my clothes to reveal the fake gun strapped to my naked inner thigh. I’ve seen the pictures and I look wonderful naked and hairless. I’m sure they’ll be a huge success in the better looking parts of the country.

However, I don’t know if I’m all for using technology to undress. I’m a bit old fashioned in that respect. I like to do things the manual way. Zips and buttons have never let The Chipster down and I trust that they never will. I’m also not so sure the government will be able to get these cameras past the stripper unions. Our membership are very protective of our skills and it would be tantamount to stealing our livelihood.

Right, my dear little Romanian songbird is screeching from the car. I have to get moving. Ibsen and Bangor's finest part-time thespians awaits.

The Gift

Gabby had a present for me today.

I woke up groggy, my mind ticking with memories of another bad night in Holyhead. Women’s faces teased me from the darkness, hands wandering over my thoughts until my flesh crept under the vague suspicion that the whole thing had been a mess of cosmic proportions.

It was about as much as I could do to splash water over my face, wrap myself in my towelling dressing gown, and try to replace the bitter taste of almonds in my mouth with the bathroom’s false fragrance. By the time I had shaved, Gabby had set a table out on the balcony of our flat.

I pour myself a glass of fresh orange juice in the kitchen before I stepped out into the fresh morning air. Looking down on Bangor’s harbour, I thought even the waves were beating a quick retreat at the first touch of the cold stone walls. Only the distant mountains seemed at ease with these winter days, sipping from the edge of a sky of blue with bright clean Curaçao.

‘Do you like it?’ she asked.

I gazed down at the box that was sitting squarely on the spot where I usually put my breakfast. Above the top of edge of the box, two eyes watched me with no little indifference.

‘It’s a dog,’ I said.

‘Cutest little puppy in all of Wales,’ said Gabs, grabbing the animal and pushing it to her cheek like she was powdering her face.

‘I don’t want a dog,’ I told her.

Romanian eyes turned teary.

‘But look how cute he is!’

I sipped my drink. I was in no mood to argue. There are many different types of bully in the world.

Stuck In Holyhead

I was in Holyhead last night, rubbing myself silly in one of my favourite little venues in North Wales, and all was going alarming well until halfway through my act when I began to think about the moral case for privacy.

It was an odd thing, to be sure. There I was, about to put my spuds and sausage on show yet again, but also considering the question of privacy from a rationalist perspective. I doubt if Spinoza could ever have found himself so thong tied, faced with such a strange conflict of interests. But there you go... It was more than enough to disturb a man, I can tell you, and not for one but two reasons.

First of all, it’s not at all like The Chipster to be so unprofessional when he’s snapping elastic for the ladies. I prefer to keep my mind on what I’m doing. But perhaps the crowd was too small for a Friday night or I felt uncomfortable wearing a particularly cheap poker dot thong. Whatever the reason, I soon found myself asking: does our right to privacy really mean that much?

And that’s when the second thing to disturb me came to mind. It was the thought that few people seem to care much about privacy these days, or if they care, they only care about those issues that catch the media headlines. Nobody considers championing those other moments of privacy that this government would so happily take from us.

You might suppose that a man given to taking his clothes off for money wouldn’t value his privacy all that highly but you’d be wrong. Being at home with my body in its natural state, albeit with a slight moistening of baby oil, is precisely what makes me understand what privacy means to us all. I think about it more often than the rest of you. I cherish a little more highly that which I give away so cheaply. Or perhaps its just that mine is one of those minds drawn to metaphysics whenever my thong gets too tight.

It was yesterday’s conviction of the News of the World reporter who tapped the royal phones that made me begin to realise how little we, as individuals, appear to care about our privacy. We hide our most personal telephone recordings behind four digit codes, easily hacked by anybody with the know-how. We install wireless routers in our homes but few of us bother to set up the security and passwords to prevent outsiders from getting access to our private network. We carry camera phones with us wherever we go, taking more and more reality from the private and into a public realm. And we’re so blasé about our right to space or to our private moments in the day that we’d happily submit to a identity card scheme and databases for our DNA.

Yet programmes such as Big Brother make it so evident that it is the little moments in our lives that actually make us all who we are. I'm now watching 'Face' from the A Team brushing his teeth and it's fascinating viewing. These are our simian moments, when we hunch our shoulders and drag our knuckles on the floor. They are the spaces in busy pretension-filled lives when we finally reveal to ourselves who we are, dripping with toothpaste and private doubts.

Privacy is like that. It is a place where we can each hide away the things that aren’t for public consumption. We all have big secrets we fear might be discovered but we also have another side to our private lives which is just as vital. Big Brother performs an important function by showing us a world where we are not allowed to be human without paying a consequence. It reminds us of a world where everybody knows when you’ve rearranged your underwear, picked your nose, or broken wind. It is a world where one person's petty animosity towards another becomes an international incident.

So we might all talk about the high and noble reasons for protecting our privacy. We might scorn those that bug telephones of the rich and famous. But let’s not forget those people who seek to take away our private time, who wish to see us on camera for an increasingly large portion of our lives, who wish to punish us for the petty, uneven, ugly sides to our natures.

Imagine a world when a man is but a scratch of an itching buttock away from public humiliation.

That’s the thought that struck me as I danced tonight in Holyhead.

And then all the ladies screamed with delight.

A Reaffirmation

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

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

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

Just thought I better ‘reaffirm’ that point.

Pit Shafts For Paedophiles

I’ve just spent my morning working myself into a sweat at my regular gym here in Bangor. But for once, it wasn’t the exercise that got The Chipster’s oils running. I’d gone about five miles on the treadmill when two of the gym’s regulars arrived and occupied the running machines on either side of me. That’s how I found myself wedged into a conversation about the current crisis in Britain’s prisons.

One of the runners, an ex-miner, began by suggesting that the country should convert many of the unused coal mines in Wales into secure units for sex offenders. He called it his ‘Pit Shafts For Paedophiles Plan’. Both his friend and I were a bit sceptical at first, until the miner carried on and described in great detail how it was cheaper than using the RAF base that John Reid currently proposes. These mines are unused, take up very little surface land, are out of the public gaze, and although they stretch for miles and miles they are already escape-proof. The only complication is that every offender would have to be given a canary but, other than this, he said that it is just about 'a perfect plan'.

Now as you know, the state of Britain’s prisons is something that leaves The Chipster lying awake in bed at night worrying. Not even Gabby’s soft singing is enough to lull me to sleep when my mind flits about considering the problem of incarceration. I don’t know... Perhaps, for some unknown reason, the poor girl’s singing makes me think I’m in prison. But whatever it is, I find myself wondering if we’re not locking up too many people for minor offences and leaving too many dangerous men at large. What even constitutes a minor offence in the eyes of the law?

Not so long ago, a pensioner went to prison for not paying her council tax. I thought it an outrage and volunteered to stage a nude protest outside the prison. Today, I hear a man convicted of downloading 200 images of child pornography has escaped a prison sentence because the judge, John Rogers, QC, said he had to consider instructions passed down to him from the Home Office. To make matters worse, this is a Welsh story. The offender in question is from Penygwdwn in Blaenau Ffestiniog. I think you’ll agree that it’s a terrible condemnation of the penal system and that's the reason I’m now offering to stage a nude protest outside the courthouse.

But The Chipster also wants to pose a hypothetical question.

A town has only one jail cell. A town meeting is called and the people have to vote as to which of the two local criminals is to be sent to prison. They can arrest the local thief, responsible for a spate of burglaries, or the man known to possess a large collection of child pornography. Which would the townsfolk collectively choose to imprison? Which would make the most people feel safe in their beds at night? The man who has committed property theft or the man who in a sense hasn’t committed a crime against a person but whose actions suggest he might well be capable of something far more serious in the future?

Which do the people choose? Where is the greater good served?

And be careful how you answer. Don’t make me stage a nude protest outside your place of work.