I Hear Monkeys

If, as usual, I sleep with the bedroom window wide open tonight and if, by some accident of noise or biology, I happen to be awake at 8.30 on a Sunday morning, the likelihood is that I’ll hear the “head monkey”, (a dark-haired "White-Handed Gibbon", to be precise), whooping the troops into action for another day in front of the utterly enthralled humans (and they always are). I live about 750m away from Lille Zoo and the gibbons there are incredible. I mean, truly incredible. They do things in apparent awareness of the people who watch and in apparent defiance of physics. They show off. They seem to focus upon doing things they know that we humans can’t do and my impression is genuinely that they “put on productions” for us. They “stage” disputes, chases and near-fatal falls and they deliberately “do the Michael Jackson” in terms of dangling their babies around in the most precarious manners. They really have to be seen to be believed. I’ll “do” the subject properly another time but, for the moment, I just wanted to say that, in all my years, it took a move to Lille to find me hearing the calls of monkeys from my bed! The photo you see here is not just a monkey in some zoo, anywhere. This is the very same zoo we're talking about, not far at all from my home and this is the very same plonker of a monkey who makes all the racket! ...... but I love it! At the moment of this photo, I suspect he's musing over whether to have a crap into the lake as usual or whether to crap onto a pelican's back, just for fun. Perhaps he'll allow himself to be guided by his audience. If it's up to me, then the pelican's back would win every time! ;o)