Holidays

The twins have gone off for the day so there’s not much ‘action’ to speak of. I didn’t venture to ask where they were going. I prefer not to know. All I can assume is that tourists in some Welsh hotspot are suffering the ‘hokey cokey blues’ today. Our thoughts should be with them.

To be honest, I welcome the break. After yesterday’s outbreak of birdy flu, we all came home and enjoyed a quiet dinner. I say ‘quiet’ but the reality was much louder than that. Glasses were shattered, headaches induced, and neighbours annoyed to the point of threats. But it does bring me nicely onto the subject of today’s post. I’ve decided to talk about my holiday plans for this year.

The Chipster doesn’t ‘do’ holidays. In fact, you could say that I rarely get beyond Bangor unless it’s work related and involves getting naked for notes of a large denomination. You might remember that I went to America earlier this year, but my experiences there should give you a good indication of why I don’t go chasing the sun. I’m also extremely careful about my skin. Though I might not be as tanned as other thonglateers, I proud to say that I have better complexion down below which is where it counts in my line of business. There’s nothing worse than a stripper with a wrinkled kneecap.

This year, I’ve been giving serious thought to spending a few days down at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. To begin with: it’s in Wales, so I wouldn’t need any extra booster shots before going and there’d be no problems with my trying to understand foreign laws relating to the wearing of thongs in public. They’d take me as I am and there’d me no words said about it. Secondly, I might also find an agent or publisher willing to take a gamble on a man light in the loins and heavy in his verbiage.

However, I’m a bit dubious about the whole ‘literary’ scene. These bookish types don’t strike me as being my kind of people and they might not take a man and his thong seriously. My last week, when not working around birdy flu, has been spent going over the draft to Big Chip Dale’s first novel. I thought it time to see what damage I’d done to the English language, but I only got half-way before desperation set it. I just don’t know if I have it in me to get to the end of all 96,000 words. The fact that it makes me smile amounts to nothing when it comes to asking the opinion of people who judge things by themes, narratives, and depressing endings involving lakes, little girls, and a dog called ‘Scamp’.

Perhaps I’m just not confident enough to be a real writer. I look good up on stage and can handle any situation that arises. But sit me down in front of a typewriter and I become a bag of undiluted worry. Many are the times I’ve had to deal with overexcited grandmothers wanting to wipe down my sweaty buttocks with their soiled underwear, but ask me to defend my use of a semi-colon and I go to pieces.

So, if it’s not the Hay festival, it’s probably Romania for the Chipster… Romania…

Gabby wants me to go visit her family and the time’s approaching when I’ll have to admit that I’d prefer to not travel into Eastern Europe. My dislike of holidays began when I was part of a cultural exchange programme a few years ago. The Iron Curtain may have come down but male stripping didn’t go down too well with those ex-KGB types. I was warned never to return and since then I’ve vowed never to travel anywhere in the old Soviet Union. I don’t know if Romania still have me on their books but I’m not willing to risk it.

So, this is how I’m spending my afternoon. Making holiday plans and getting nowhere.

Which, when I think about it, might be as good a holiday destination as any…

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…

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.