As well as using the name "Monkeyman" on this forum, I use the word "Monkey" somewhere in the screen name for most poker sites I use. The exceptions are Doyle"s Room where I am "Letsbeavinu", Skypoker where I am "Imafish" and Virgin where I am "Whatafish" as well as "Idrivetractors" on Blue Square.
The reasons for this apparent monkey fixation arise from a conversation I had with my elder niece, who was nine at the time but is now thirteen. We were playing games on the computer at my parents" house and for some reason, I called her a "Little Monkey". I don"t know if this is just me, but I sometimes seem to get drawn into conversations which get sillier with every comment and get to the point where none of the participants can remember what the conversation was originally about. If you"ve even seen the Vicar of Dibley, think of the parish council meetings and you"ll get the idea. From calling her a "Little Monkey", my niece and I came up with an idea to make our fortunes, which was to open a monkey-related theme park. All the rides and attractions were to have a monkey theme and at the height of our silliness, we even decided that no cash was to change hands in the park. At he entrance, visitors had to buy a bag of bananas which were to be used as payment tokens for the rides. The point at which we decided we couldn"t get any dafter was when we thought that we would pay all the staff in peanuts, as everybody knows that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys and having the park staffed by monkeys would lend a degree of authenticity. Our business was to be called "Monkeyworld".
This conversation took place during November and during the subsequent christmas holidays, my niece almost ignored all her christmas presents and set about creating models of all the Monkeyworld rides. A few weeks later, I was presented with three plastic bags full of roundabouts and rollercoasters made from toilet roll inners and tissue boxes.
Shortly after all this happened, I googled "Monkeyworld" and found that there was an ape rescue centre of this name in Devon. The real Monkeyworld has been the subject of a TV series on Animal Planet and Channel Five.
A few months later, I was thinking about what to get my niece for her birthday. I looked at the Monkeyworld website and found that, like most zoos, it was possible to adopt an animal. Even better, it was possible to adopt specific named animals and, this caused much merriment at the time, Monkeyworld had a chimpanzee called Simon. This settled it for me. My niece"s present that year was the adoption of Simon the monkey and to this day, she still receives quarterly newsletters from him.
Incidentally, my other niece subsequently adopted an orangutan and for the first few levels of my first APAT national (Luton last year) I wore a Monkeyworld baseball cap.
