Giantmonk is such a lazy thing, sometimes.

Sleep is an important part of life for all mammals, which we all must indulge in nightly to stay fit and healthy.

Doctors believe that a minimum of six hours a night is needed to keep an adult fit and healthy, as sleep is the time when the body regenerates cells and the brain can review it’s workings and experiences in able to form new connections. Though six hours seems to be the minimum amount of sleep the body and brain should properly function on, eight hours helps the body and brain feel more rested and refreshed. More sleep means more cell regeneration, more brain connections.

So, as I am always on a quest to be as healthy as I can, treating my body as a temple and all that, I try to get a minimum of 18 hours sleep a day.

Sometimes people come up to me and ask ‘what came first, the chicken or the Egg?’ which is an odd question as chickens have been around in one form or another for hundreds of thousands of years, whereas Egg only came to live with us in 2005.

Friends of Monkey, and to a lesser extent Mimi, have done the most wonderful thing and clubbed together to buy a iDoodad touchpod, or something. It’s all shiny touch screen and app-loaded, bells and whistles, gloss and sparkles. I’m not sure what it does but the upshot is that I can take loads of pictures and update this blog really quickly and easily now, even whilst relaxing in my armchair with a  Monkey beer, taking big lung-fulls of next doors barbecue smell whilst contemplating toasting some crumpet whilst watching the football.

I am now a positively mobile Monkey.

Prince William and Kate have been looking for some new art of distinguished guests and friends to hang in their new castle, so I have been recently obliged to sit for a portrait. I do find it a little tedious to sit in such an attitude for so long a period of time, but it is all for a good cause as I would not dream of denying the future king my likeness upon his wall. I hope they hang it up next to Rolf Harris’s portrait of William’s nan.

I received a double tip-off the other day, courtesy of both A Girl In Winter and Katiepops, that life-sized models of Munkeh have been spotted for sale at various locations around the country. These ‘stunt-munks’ are made to roughly the same dimensions as Munkeh, and though not as cute, would still make a good monkey-mascot for those bereft of a monkey companion.

I set off on the investigative trail to try and track down one of these imitation Munkehs.

Now, my hidden camera received some interference whilst in the store, but I can assure you that there were stacks and stacks of imitation Munkehs all over the store. What’s more, the Stunt-Munks were wearing a rather snazzy Christmas jumper, so I invited one to accompany me home where he immediately made the gift of his jumper to Munkeh, who he seemed to hold in some reverence.

Munkeh seems a little suspicious of his slightly wonky doppleganger, so I haven’t told him about the entire army of such Stunt-Munks that I encountered in the shop, but the one that followed us home doesn’t seem like a bad sort, really, and Munkeh does like his new jumper.

He’s even been wearing it to social occasions:

If you’d like your own life-size model of Munkeh, I entreat you to go down to your local supermarket and look there. They are well dressed and even come bearing a free box of tea, which you can give to your nan,

Here’s an exciting new development – World of Monkey T-shirts from Amazon!

I’m so excited to see my face on a t-shirt and I hope that any Friends of Monkey might pop by and have a look and let me know what they think. If I see you walking down the road wearing one of these fab t-shirts one day I will be sure to say hello. They are available in both ‘Sky High Blue’ (above) and ‘Monkey Brown’ (below), and for the low price of £12.99, which just about buys you a fried breakfast nowadays. Unlike fried breakfasts, though, World of Monkey t-shirts make you look better.

Monkey t-shirt in 'Monkey Brown'

If they went down to my diminutive size, I’d never take mine off.

About a year and a half ago, my human friend Mimi knitted me a cardigan. It was blue with long sleeves. It was warm when I was cold, and so I was thankful.

Mimi had only been knitting for a few months, so did her best. She made it out of the thinnest wool she had, but it was still quite bulky on me because I am not very big. And she had to write the cardigan pattern from scratch, because there aren’t many patterns for cardigans for 30cm tall monkeys on the market.

But though I quite liked my cardigan, and at first people said it was great, after a while my friends started saying ‘oh, you must hate wearing that silly looking cardigan, Monkey’, and ‘look at how stiff and rough it looks – the shoulders are too big’, etc.

I didn’t hate wearing my cardigan, no, but the more people said that, the less I wanted to wear it, until, after a while, I decided to try and hide it. I did this because it made me feel embarrassed to wear the cardigan, and I didn’t want Mimi to feel upset that I didn’t want to wear something she spent so long knitting.

But I couldn’t throw it away, so I hid it beneath the bed, and made do with being cold.

Then, one day, Mimi came in from the bedroom with something blue and a little dusty in her hand, she had found my cardigan.

‘Look, Monkey! Oh, we’ve found your cardigan – you can be lovely and warm again!’

In a way I was happy that she’d found it, because so much hard work went into making me a cardigan all of my very own, but what could I say when she encouraged me to wear it when I went to see my friends in Morecambe?

So, I’ve hidden it again. It’s under the sofa, far enough back so that it won’t be accidentally hoovered up, because I don’t want to really lose it. But hopefully Mimi will see that I am starting to get cold now that it is November, and I really could do with something to keep warm. If she can’t find my cardigan, maybe she’ll make me something new. Perhaps something like Giantmonk’s snazzy tank top, so that my friends can’t say how stiff it looks, or that the shoulders don’t fit, or ask if I can even move my arms when I wear it.

Thanks for keeping me warm though, blue cardigan.

Before I came to live at Monkey Towers I had another life. One of glitz and glamour, bright lights and long carpets of scarlet red, lit by the flaring bulbs of a swarm of photographers. I can’t say it was ‘work’ as such, it came so very easily. Perhaps my biggest film was one that I starred in alongside Sigourney Weaver.

Gorillas In The Mist is a heart-breaking tale of the protection of one of our planet’s most noble and endangered creatures. It was a tough role. I’m not a gorilla, but I am a method actor.