Monkey Business

I spent most of the day with my parents yesterday. Do you see what happens when I don’t have specific plans? Anyway, my sister was there for a lot of the time and we went out and had lunch and it was fine. I stayed and chatted to mum for a bit and we completed a crossword – which involved much cheating and looking words up in the dictionary, but completed is completed. I then taught mum how to use predictive text on her mobile phone. So I had to come up with sentences for her to type, which *may* have included her writing a text that I then sent to my sister telling her that she had been disinherited and all my parents’ money is now going to me. My sister texted back and said “Have you two been drinking?” Apart from the incredibly strong coffee I’d had in the restaurant earlier in the day, the answer was ‘no’.

I ended up with a bit of a sore throat due to singing to my nephew and doing various animal noises, which made him laugh. They probably sounded nothing like the actual animal, but he is one years old, so what does he know? The chap who I sit next to at work regularly does otter impressions for me (don’t ask...), so I feel my repertoire is fairly extensive.

There’s this song that I learnt when I was a child called “I Went to the Animal Fair”, but neither my sister or I remember quite where we know it from. I sing it to my nephew and it goes:

I went to the animal fair
And who do you think was there?
The great baboon by the light of the moon was combing his golden hair
The monkey fell out of his bunk.
And slid down the elephant’s trunk.
The elephant sneezed.
And fell on his knees.
And what became of the monkey, monkey, monkey, monkey...

It’s a round, so now you have to sing it. Go on, I won’t laugh. What do you mean you don’t know the tune? Picky, picky, picky... Ok then, what about “I’m being eaten by a boa constrictor (and I don’t like it one bit)”? It does contain the very racy line “Oh heck, it’s up to my neck”, which as a small child I was really shocked by. What can I tell you? I was young. You see there is much to be learned from the songs of our youth- such as the unpleasantness of being eaten by a boa constrictor. But I never did find out what happened to the monkey.