Sarko's monkish pledge

President Sarkozy has vowed to become a monk if he is voted out of office in May. I hope this is a subtle way of confirming that Carla Bruni will remain the first lady of France if he loses the election. A woman of her regal beauty clearly belongs in the Élysée Palace as much as the Louis XVI four-poster bed, whose sheets she could earnestly keep warm for the next incumbent. 

Of course, it’s pretty arrogant of Sarko to assume he can just walk into a monastery and become a monk. What makes him think he’s got the required aptitude? If I were the abbot, I’d tell him to check into his local YMCA wearing nothing but a goat-hair robe and a pair of sandals. If he can survive for six weeks without agitating the other residents or scratching beneath the habit, he might be suitable for the monkish way of life. 

You notice that I haven’t mentioned sexual abstinence. This is because I’ve never been sure that monks were celibate after seeing The Name of the Rose. The movie has a scene where an apprentice monk played by Christian Slater loses his virginity to an incredibly sensual peasant girl who wears no underwear. It’s not clear what she was doing in the monastery, but she was never made to feel unwelcome until the Inquisition turned up and denounced her as a witch. There’s always a party pooper who wants to spoil the fun. 

I’m not saying all monks are as corrupt as those medieval ones. There was absolutely no hanky panky in the Shaolin temple that Kwai Chang Caine learnt his Kung Fu techniques. This didn't mean he was doomed to a life of meditation and spanking the monkey. Before Caine set off on his quest, he had the following memorable exchange with Master Kan: 

Caine: And what of women, Master? It is permitted for one of our temple to love a woman and feel the warmth of her body? 

Master Kan: We allow no women inside our temple, for flesh that is indulged will not be trained, and minds that are bewitched will not be disciplined. Yet the monk who makes his way in the world cannot shut his ears to the music of birdsong, nor close his mouth to the taste of wild honey. 

Caine took this to mean that once he left the temple he was free to fraternise with females who chirped at him and stick his tongue into their honey pots. I think he got laid in the first episode of Kung Fu, after a woman he shacked up with said he must have “other needs” apart from “food and a place to sleep”. It has since been acknowledged that telling a woman you only need food and a place to sleep is a brilliant seduction technique. Women love to fuck men who don’t want to fuck them. 

It doesn’t work with female gorillas, though. Any male who tells them he wants nothing but food and a place to sleep is treated as a pathetic loser whose balls have stopped functioning. 

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Zebra attack

A woman from Texas has become a celebrity after getting bitten by a hungry zebra. After TV footage of her misadventure was shown at the safari guesthouse, I’m sorry to say that a young lady from Oklahoma asked me to bite her: 

“Oh c’mon, GB!” she pleaded. “Just one lil’ ol’ hickey on the side a mah neck. Momma’s waiting to get it on the camcorder.” 

(Her mother was a woman of generous proportions, standing a few feet away with her legs wide apart and the camera to her eye. I did not admonish her for being a willing accomplice in her daughter’s outlandish project. We live in a peculiar age.) 

“By God, I won’t do it!” I thundered. “I don’t want millions of You Tube viewers deriding me as a crazy ape!” 

“No one’s gonna think you’re crazy, GB, they’ll just reckon you’re a mite over-affectionate. Doncha wanna know what I taste like? Fellas tell me I taste real good.” 

“We gorillas are vegetarian, Miss, didn’t they teach you that at school?” 

“They sure didn’t teach us gorillas were spoilsports at school,” she huffed. “Guess I’ll have to ask a chimp or summin.” 

I said nothing to this. A chimpanzee would probably dine on her like a vampire, but sometimes it’s better to let humans learn from their mistakes. 

I wonder whether her envy of the zebra-bitten Texas woman was aggravated by being a native of an adjoining state. In my time in the circus, I became aware of the intense rivalries that exist between neighbouring human tribes. I remember once asking a Welsh clown whether I should financially compensate the ringmaster after accidentally trampling him underfoot. 

“Why bother, he’s only an Englishman,” replied the clown. “They usually enjoy that sort of thing.” 

It seems that even the Chinese are susceptible to such petty rancour. I was shocked to read about a man from Chongqing whose front door has been glued shut more than 30 times by an anonymous fiend. Had it happened only five or six times, one might have dismissed it as the prank of a practical joker, but gluing a door shut 30 times clearly amounts to a vendetta. Whoever is responsible must be motivated by boundless malice and a peculiar obsession about denying his victim free passage to and from his own property. 

“I have no idea who I could have upset so badly,” said Zhou Fen, the hapless householder.

I would advise him to think back to his childhood, and make a list of all the boys he knew from neighbouring villages. It's quite possible that one of them has a grudge which has festered over the years. These things can happen inadvertently from the most trivial incidents. Maybe he humiliated another boy in a game of checkers or laughed at his willy when they were urinating against a wall. 

If the mystery remains unsolved, and the door-gluing continues, he could always try appeasing his persecutor by leaving and entering through a window. 

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Viagra abuse

An English TV gardener has been feeding his plants Viagra to stiffen up their stalks. Doesn’t he know that plants don’t have sex by poking their stalks in places? Even if they did, they wouldn’t want some meddling botanist playing the pander by feeding them chemical stimulants. Nature is not a giant whorehouse for humans to pimp around in with their pills and potions. 

The worrying thing for the English housewife is that farmers might now start using this method to firm up their vegetables. The authorities better make sure that supermarkets label their produce correctly, so respectable households don’t end up chewing sticks of celery laced with Viagra. The English home is a finely-tuned ecosystem which depends on its resident sexual organs behaving predictably and obediently. Its harmony would be destroyed if willies started popping up all over the place. 

You might think that a big macho gorilla like me would have no use for Viagra. Well, I have considered using the blue pills, but not in a way you might imagine. We jungle-dwelling apes, you see, have to deal with deadly creatures that might do us harm. The most dangerous beasts are not hippos and crocodiles, but critters that creep around slyly. Snakes are a particularly aggravating hazard. The manager of the safari camp advocates a no-nonsense approach in dealing with them: 

“Chop their fucking heads off!” he once exhorted. “I’ll lend you my machete if you want.”

“That’s a very human solution to the problem,” I remarked. “We gorillas prefer less messy methods of removing unwanted guests.” 

That’s when I dreamt up the idea of doping snakes with Viagra, which would render them harmless by making them as rigid as French bread. Snakes in that condition would be unable to hiss or squirm or move from A to B. We could just pick them up and humanely dispose of them, possibly by hurling them a good distance like javelins. The only difficulty would be getting the snakes to swallow the pills in the first place. One possibility is to feed them mice that have been force fed with Viagra. You may say this is cruel to the mice, but let’s face it: they’re going to get eaten anyway. Maybe we’ll let the little rodents have a last night of shagging before they’re sacrificed in a noble cause. 

I shouldn’t leave you with the impression that I consider all humans to be machete-wielding maniacs, like the manager of the safari camp. Obviously, upright primates have a violent side to their nature (which they get from their chimp genes), but they also have a pacifist side to their nature (which they get from their gorilla genes). A laudable example of benign human behaviour was seen in the recent cuddle party at a London train station, in which pairs of humans attempted to break the world record for the longest hug. I don’t know if any of them succeeded, but the girls on the left deserve points for artistic impression. 

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Bell-end of the world

Tending bar at the safari guesthouse, I overhear a Rasputin-like character telling everyone that the world will end in 2012. Accursed fool! Apocalyptic blabbering of that sort is tremendously harmful for our tourism industry, because people never visit Africa when they know their days are numbered. India has pretty much cornered the last-hurrah market thanks to its mystics and gurus, who can offer gullible visitors a final shot at enlightenment. In Africa we only have witchdoctors, who can offer gullible visitors potions that will make their eyebrows bushy. 

Fortunately, I have the perfect titbit of news to change the subject:

“Ladies and gentlemen!” I declare, “I must inform you of an extraordinary development in Iran! A 21-year-old man is suffering from a permanently aroused appendage after getting his penis tattooed. This is a clear sign that the Iranian missile programme lacks a reliable guidance system and is therefore quite harmless. I’m not making this up, I’ll print out the news report if you want to read about it.” 

As I anticipate, the guests turn their back on the doomsday prophet and focus their attention on the Iranian erection. 

“Oh my God!” exclaims a middle-aged American woman. “Where can my husband get one of those tattoos?!” 

The other guests weigh-in with their own suggestions and observations, and a lighter mood prevails in the evening’s social intercourse. 

All joking aside, I don’t think a woman would really want the man in her life to have a permanent stiffy. The novelty is bound to wear off eventually. As the Roman nobility discovered, if every day is a party, partying becomes a chore. There would also be the problem of inadvertent prodding whenever she brushed within range, which would bound to get annoying after a while. 

One point not covered in the news bulletin is whether the man’s todger was taut while the tattoo was being inscribed. It might have been necessary to provide a suitable surface, but how many tattooists could perform their art on an aroused sexual organ? One would need the hand of a surgeon and the nerve of a bomb-disposal expert to pull off a tricky stunt like that. 

Now, the mad monk who was pontificating about the end of the world was actually an insurance salesman from Bulgaria. He had allowed his hair to grow unkempt to give himself a prophet-like appearance, and had financed his vacation in the Congo with the maturity value of one of his own policies. I later asked him what he knew about the Mayan doomsday prediction: 

“No more than any gypsy who reads a newspaper,” he answered. “I was using this story to practice my English-speaking on the guests. If I appear convincing to them, maybe I call sell insurance in America.” 

“I’m sure you could sell anything in America,” I replied, “but please lighten-up when you’re in the Congo. If you go around staring intensely at people over here they assume you’re in league with the snakes.” 

He stared intensely at me like a snake, so I gave his beard a tug to snap him out of it. 

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The Austrian school

I do hope someone nominates Ylva Maria Thompson for Businesswoman of the Year. This visionary lady has established an international sex school in Vienna, where students will be encouraged to practice their lessons in mixed-gender dormitories. Frau Thompson has been quick to refute suggestions that her school is a glorified bawdyhouse for swingers and exhibitionists: 

“Anyone who doesn’t take it seriously and fools around will be sent to my office,” she declared sternly. “And get a big spanking from the headmistress,” she forgot to add. 

What I like most about this venture is its power to transform the image of Austria, a country best known for giving the world Hitler and The Sound of Music. Both were profoundly anti-sexual. Let’s face it, no one was ever going to get laid in the von Trapp mansion with all those fresh-faced children running around the place, singing songs guaranteed to make a man dick’s shrivel. Can anyone imagine Captain von Trapp giving goody-two-shoes Maria a vigorous pounding? The thought makes me want to gargle with lemon juice to get the taste out of my mouth. As for Hitler, he was a mono-testicled voyeur who enjoyed watching women urinate, which doesn’t count as sex in this quadrant of the galaxy. 

Hopefully, people will now associate Austria with the school’s promotional video, in which smooth naked bodies paw each other to Ms Thompson’s authoritative voiceover. There is something deeply life-affirming about a sixtyish woman tutoring people in the finer points of fondling their erogenous zones. I bet she gives out instructions with the same calm self-assurance when being pleasured by her own fancy man. 

Now, most of the apes I know would consider giving sex lessons to be like teaching someone how to scratch an itch. Certainly, any human who offered gorillas mating advice would be hooted out of the jungle with his underpants pulled over his head. As an ape who prides himself on being a student of humanity, I have pondered the question of why humans, of all the primates, have to be taught how to do it. I believe the answer can be summed up in three words: the human female. 

Female apes, you see, have a well-defined oestrus cycle. When one of our females is in season, all the male has to do is puff out his cheeks and fire at will. Nothing much can go wrong when the plan of action is that simple. Women, by contrast, don’t have a season when they’re in heat, so men are never sure how receptive they are. Most women, in fact, have to be wooed and cajoled and petted and prodded before they’re ready for action. That’s why men have to be taught how to arouse them, and women have to be taught how to help things along without making sarcastic remarks or laughing at the wrong moment. 

This isn’t meant to be a criticism of women, of course. They may be complex, but then so are quantum physics and fluid dynamics. It’s all part of life’s rich tapestry. 

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Kepler-22b

A fellow passenger on the flight home to Africa urges me to post a video monologue of myself on You Tube. 

“You’d be a bigger sensation than the talking dog!” he exclaims. 

(Apparently, this was the top-rated clip of 2011.)

I thank him for his high opinion of me and pick up a copy of Scientific American to discourage further conversation. In that prestigious periodical, I discover that the Earth has a habitable sister planet called Kepler-22b. Not the prettiest name, it’s true, but you can’t judge a planet by what it’s called. Venus is a complete hell-hole regardless of its beautiful appellation. 

On returning to the Congo, I mention this nugget of astronomical news to the manager of the safari camp. 

“I like the sound of that planet!” he enthuses. “And for all we know, gorillas might be the dominant species on it. If you went there as the ambassador from Earth, I’m sure they’d let you hump all the best-looking females!” 

“I doubt that a gorilla-run world would adopt the diplomatic protocols of the Woodstock Hippie Camp,” I remark. “Looks aren’t important to gorillas, anyway. You humans love to anthropomorphize.” 

In truth, I wouldn’t want to live on a planet where gorillas were the preponderant species. The good thing about being a gorilla on Earth is that you stand out from the crowd, by which I mean the great swarming mass of sweaty humans. Crowds of gorillas simply do not exist. All I had to do to become the talk of the town was join a circus and kick a few clowns in the arse. Humans, by contrast, have to take part in talent shows or have sex with celebrities if they want to get noticed. 

Even actors have to work hard to stay in the limelight. For every instantly recognisable movie star, there must be twenty with vaguely familiar faces whose names are never mentioned in the gossip sheets. Many who were once household names later vanish without trace. I often wonder what happened to Charlene Tilton, the pint-sized blonde who played Lucy Ewing in Dallas. I’ll never forget the way her character responded to J.R. when he tried to bait her at the breakfast table: 

“They say that fella you’re dating is the biggest jackass north of the Rio Grande!” he would say to Lucy with a malevolent sneer. 

“He’d enjoy kicking your ass for sure!” she would reply with a scowl that might have scared a grizzly bear into putting its paws over its crotch. 

If Kepler-22b really is a gorilla planet, we should send them Charlene as our ambassador. If they can’t intimidate a feisty little Earthling like her, they’ll know not to mess with the big boys. Maybe I’ll get the ball rolling by sending her a fan letter. She can’t be getting too many at this point in her career, and might welcome some adulation from a gorilla who relished her performances. If I get a reply, I’ll republish it in full in this blog.

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