Monkey Business

Who doesn't like monkeys? That's like, as in enjoy, are entertained by, have a respect for and an affinity towards. I'm not talking 'love', there may well be (let's face it, there are) those who put their inner monkey in a monkey but more of that later, what I'm on about is like.

The great monkeys - chimp, orang-utan, bonobo, gorilla, Galen, Cornelius and Monkey (Great Sage Equal Of Heaven).

Monkey (GSEOH) along with the two Pigsies, Sandy, the woman who was apparently a man and a horse/dragon. OK not the horse, it always felt like a late inferior addition to the pantheon, the scrappy doo of Monkey. Monkey was mythical, he had a staff that got bigger when he rubbed it, he could change into anything, fight with proper sound effects and could fly on a magic cloud. To know as a child, that I could never grow up to fly on a cloud or have a magic staff that grew to epic proportions when I rubbed it, is it any wonder that I lacked that ambition, that my get up and go, got up and left when I was only a teenager.

To paraphrase David Attenborough, there is nothing quite like looking into the eyes of a mountain gorilla that will make you want to turn up the mood lighting and put on some Barry White.

Still however much humanity and kindness you can see in the eyes of a gorilla, the rest of it still looks like a gorilla. Can a human mate with a monkey? Yes. Should a human...show of hands.....good that's a no. Also an adult gorilla is about three times as strong as a human, so why would anyone 'go ape' with a female whose disappointment at a poor performance could rip your arms off.

Can that ill advised jungle jump lead to a human/monkey hybrid? I think so. Ryan Giggs, Wayne Rooney, if they let their hair grow a bit, could be tranquillised and put behind zoo bars without hesitation. Surely somewhere in their ancestry there was a hint of the forbidden banana?

The bonobo we are told lives in a matriarchical society and never goes to war with other tribes. Yet the patriarch chimp will eat, fuck and kill anything that moves and not always in that order. Perhaps this recognition between human and chimp helps to explain which ape we chose to drink tea and move furniture.

Tarzan would have looked an idiot with a little bonobo sidekick and not the completely sensible looking white man in a loincloth, swinging through trees in the middle of Africa. Although the cartoon Tarzan did have a little monkey, maybe a bonobo but then he lacked the speeded up film savagery of Johnny Weissmuller or the 70s sophistication of Ron Ely. In fact I hated the cartoon Tarzan, his monkey was shit.