The Romanian Gambit

Gabby had some interesting news for me yesterday afternoon.

‘Chip?’ she said, ‘I want to become a man.’

I dropped my lunch into my lap. ‘I beg your pardon?’

She put her hands on her hips, tears in her eyes. ‘Gabby wants operation to become man.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s what I thought you’d said,’ I replied when I came around in the ambulance twenty minutes later.

On the drive home from the hospital, the situation became more clear to me.

‘I read in paper that men have more chance to become rich and successful,’ she explained. ‘I thought, if I become man, I might become rich and successful.’

‘Rubbish,’ I scoffed. ‘This has more to do with your dream of getting into the SAS!’

She blushed and I knew I was closer to the truth. There have been recruitment brochures for the Parachute Regiment falling through the letterbox for days. It had got to the point that I’d been laying out smoke markers for them so they would know where to land.

‘So what if it is?’ she asked. ‘Can’t a girl have her dreams?’

‘But Gabs,’ I said, cradling her in my arms. ‘Do you really want to have your things altered just so you can be dropped deep behind enemy lines in Afghanistan with a kit full of knifes, guns, and booby traps? Is that what you want?’

‘But Chip, I want to fulfill my potential.’

The poor girl had me there. What’s the point in being trained to the highest level of combat readiness without having chance to try it out for real? All the years she’s spend learning karate and judo, the knife fighting lessons, the years she spend in the Romanian commando school become proficient in light arms. It is all to be wasted?

‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said. ‘You are clearly cut out to inflict the severest punishment on our enemies. But you wouldn’t be happy just to record another Cheeky Girls album?’

She shrugged. ‘Will you still love me if I become a man?’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well, now, you see… Of course, you know, live and let live. That’s my motto. I’m liberal, you know, and I believe that we should all have the right… you know, to… to you know… Ah…’

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘well, now, you see… The thing is Gabby, much as I love you for yourself…’

‘Chip wouldn’t love me?’

‘Look,’ I said, trying to get my words out before the very unmanly tears began. I wasn't so sure they wouldn't be my own. ‘I’m certain there’s a way around this. There has to be a way to make you happy without the need for such drastic changes.’

It took the rest of the day, dozens of phone calls, and a last minute dash into town for an interview, but, before the sun set on a rather relieved Bangor, Gabby declared that she was happy to remain a woman.

‘This is wonderful,’ she said, coming to the breakfast bar this morning. ‘Do you like?’ she asked as she gave me a spin in her new uniform.

‘Without a doubt, you are the sexist traffic warden in Bangor,’ I said before I pushed a contented spoonful of Alpen into my mouth.

‘That’s good,’ she smiled. ‘I give you ticket for car parked on single yellow. You have twenty eight days or I come after you and I know where you live.’

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.

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…

A Bitter Stripper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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