Scape The Ape

We were hoping to bring you the final installment of our St Bride Street photo trilogy, a series that will be justly praised by blogologists and Flickr-geeks to come. But we mislaid the USB cable, so it will have to keep. But it's reeeeeelly good, honest.

In the meantime, a teensy rant about the remnants of empire, sparked by this story in today's New York Times. It involves, monkeys, clowing, and irritated expatriates, which are some of ur favourite things. It has this awesome little sentence, which shoulld make register right now, and go and read the whole thing:

"Little did Churchill envision how big the monkey population would grow, nor the shenanigans that would come along with it."

The residents of Gibraltar have only three ways of making money: offshore finance, usually involving brass-plaque companies, which is ever so slightly shady, people recreating the opening scene from The Living Daylights, and monkeys. And apparently the monkeys are hugely pissing off the locals by stealing their crisps.

Now, this whinging attitude is typical of Brits that end up abroad. Yes, even the ones in America. And the Brits located in precarious and nonsensical colonies established less than 400 years ago tend to be among the worst. We single out for attention here the Gibraltarians and Ulster Unionists, clinging to an ideal of Britishness that no longer exists. In fact a surly rejection of British authority is probably the Pitcairn Islanders' only redeeming feature.

Now that said, it's their crisps, and if they don't want to give them away then they should be left unmolested. The monkeys? Some kind of mixture of contraceptives and accidentally-on-purpose bad driving should help reduce numbers. Ape-clubbing is not a sport we'd want to wish on the nippers.