Hey, Hey, We're the Monkeys

Just recently I mentioned to Ray Owen, an author friend of mine with a vivid imagination, that an event had occurred with my car.

I suspect that he thought I was taking the… er… well… piss, really.

Here is photographic evidence to the contrary!

Yes. It is the detritus left behind from the behind of monkeys as they left my car behind them, as it were.

Indeed, the car is weighed down by a liberal coating of monkey urine and faecal deposits.

Aah! Aren’t they cute those little furry chaps? So much like humans.

Rats.

Actually, rats and rabbits, for example, are inclined to be rather more civilised in their habits but enough of that.

I am now about to go down the road to take my car to the washing facility where the lads will swarm over it, rather in the fashion of monkeys, and cleanse it with deep foam and high-pressure hoses!

As Ray will confirm to you, whatever we, as authors, imagine behind our fervid brows there are stranger things out there.

Truth, it has been said, is stranger than fiction. This is a saying that has been bandied about by countless generations and yet it remains true no matter how strange it may appear to be.

In Yosemite National Park there are geysers and pools of water that are so corrosive and hot that they will rip your skin off in moments. Yet creatures, bacteria, live in there.

Who would have thought?

There are colonies of creatures at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean living in pressures that would crush a human being to a very thin icicle in milliseconds. There is almost no oxygen and certainly no sunlight and yet they live. Crabs, prawns, fish, tube worms, et al, thrive in this undersea World that should be lifeless.

Whatever we writers come up with it is almost certain that nature has preceded us—if not on this planet then, perhaps, on another.

Maybe, even, a planet not so far away. Some of the moons of the major planets may harbour life. Methane atmospheres, as on Titan (Saturn’s giant moon), are inimical to human life but something my have a very happy life at minus one hundred and eighty degrees in an oxygen free environment.

Who knows?

No need to suspend belief. Anything is possible.

In Europe you have badgers; in America you have racoons; in Asia we have monkeys.

Monkeys that choose my car as a toilet!