Cheeky Monkey is 30+ this Week

Bloody hell, I’m getting old. I only have a handful of offline friends so in theory, I could get away with a trip to the local pub for some fancy grub then back to the house for a tipple and then that would be it: another birthday done and dusted. My woman on the other hand has other ideas. She’d have loads of friends to come for a house party and so, in the next few days I’d be moping around oriental supermarkets as her kitchen bitch. My mom was a home economics teacher: one of those oldie worldly parts of elementary school where young boys and girls are taught how to cook, grow a vegetable and mend holes in old socks and knickers. In other words, she was a domestic goddess both in school and in our own house when I was little and to be honest, I’ve grown up reasonably prepared for life. I can fairly muster a good slap up meal.

It’s the prospect of feeding a few thousand people all together at the same time I find as a steep learning curve. Case in point yesterday: spent three hours at Tesco’s trying to tick off last bit on my list to buy – sprouted beans for the spring rolls. I wondered: do they grow them in winter? There are lots of other normal looking beans in there but none of them is sprouted. And why would you have bloody spring rolls in winter anyway? I resigned. Three long hours is bloody long time to spend on such a freak herbaceous plant. That’s three hours I could have spent watching valuable TV and reading lovely blogs.

I planned to stick a lovely picture of me here as a baby whom I thought would be cool but decided against when I looked at it this morning. I was a nasty piece of work. A face really only a mother can love. There are some advantages to it of course, as you don’t get your nose or your cheeks pinched all the time by dirty old hags when they come round your house to use the toilet. For some bizarre reason, our house is the only building smacked in the middle of the town between shops and the church with toilet facility.

“Oh, he ain’t a cute kid,” are perhaps the first words I learnt, as I wasn’t really confident with my looks when I was young. I looked after a young lad with Asperger’s Syndrome last week whom I had a nice time talking with and found out some similarities between him and myself when I was growing up. I was so socially inept and had very few friends. I only have just one friend when I was a young schoolboy and only because he carried my backpack and did my writing when the teacher was not looking. I started going out with girls really late because I was pretty convinced I was a monkey.

The 80’s should have been the years I'd cross-pollinated all the flowers I could find in the garden patch figuratively but I was doing it rather literally. All the other boys in our class were listening to Sex Pistols, had spiked hair and looked really cool in sunglasses. I had Petri dish in my backpack, a green thumb, had no idea what snogging is and had Wooly Bully- a pretty stupid obscure song by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs as a favourite.




The 90’s turned a bit sharpish to my favour. The grunge scruffy look was all the rage, oversized charity shopped shirt tucked in the wrong places, Kurt Cobain killed himself as an act of self defiance to fame and women started to look at slightly autistic men in a different light.

2006 - This year I started to blog and even as my girlfriend is now quite busy in the kitchen, I can’t help myself getting online as soon as I dropped the grocery bags.


This blog is quite sad and pathetic. Pardon me, I have to digress big time here.


Okey, the girl has called someone's idol a monkey but what now? That is her personal opinion and that's what free speech is all about.

"Nobody should be running around in a murderous frenzy and do something akin to a "blog rape" of obviously, a young and still quite naive blogger. Monkey is not really that offensive and she definitely has valid points in her rant, so give the kid a break! She has not offended a god or a prophet, and even so, I wouldn't agree that someone should stick a bomb in his / her arse to avenge the insult that someone has caused to an ideal or religion, let alone a boxer. Some of the so called intellectuals here who sadly, support the notion that she is just reaping what she sowed are also missing the point. It is unfortunately, quite shallow to react to this really childish argument.

If they are really smart, they wouldn’t be engaging in this stupid kind of nonsense blog war. Why not intelligently challenge her on why she believes that Manny doesn’t deserve to have his statue erected alongside * Rizal or Bonifacio..?”

Someone screamed from the kitchen. Oh, okey. I have to log off now. I need to peel some potatoes.

* Rizal is a Philippine national hero. Bonifacio could have been the national hero, but he isn't toff. Manny is, well... Just a minger with boxing gloves on.

Good News: Pinochet Died this Morning. Amen.