Plan B of The Apes

I was pulling fleas out of the matted mane of Poncho, my best mate when there was a bit of a commotion up the road to our vantage point on The Rock.

Simpkins, Gonzalez and Vauxhall Viva, the rest of my posse were engaged in removing the sat nav shark fin aerial from a nearly new BMW when they caught sight of the suspicious movements of the occupants of a large white van.

Amongst the obvious hire vehicles carrying curious holidaymakers the commercial vehicle stuck out like a seagull amongst ducks.

Most visitors to the summit of The Rock were there for the unrivalled views over the British Territory, the Spanish Mainland to the north and with the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the far distant shore of the African Continent to the South of the Straits. That's what they purported to be doing but in fact they were here to see us perform as the infamous Barbary Macaques of Gibraltar.

We have quite a history you know from being brought here by Jack Tars in the 18th Century  and then firmly establishing ourselves under the very believable myth that if we were to leave then Gibraltar was fall from the control of the Brits. I thought that fear, a very real fear expressed by many of those making the ascent of a failed colonial conquest would perpetuate our presence for my generation and those succeeding us.

I should have suspected something was going on when during our regular foraging trips into the bins and harassing of the hapless tourists a few of a neighbouring gang of Barbary's including Sanchez, Burt Reynolds, Watney Red and Maggie Fatcher were pounced on by official looking types and made to wear a collar bedecked with a lozenge shaped device.

By some supernatural force emanating from the jewel on the collar that gang could always be located as though constantly watched by a higher power. It was spooky.

Disappointingly the antics of my own band of monkeys ranging from stealing food from the hands of adults, terrorising small children to drop and abandon their sweets and ice-creams, urinating on car windscreens and throwing pooh liberally through the sun roofs of coach parties brought us to the attention of the all seeing collar and we all found ourselves sporting this badge of honour.

Anyhow, back to the big white Transit.

Men clad in overalls spilled out and their surprisingly speedy movement over the car park tarmac caught us unawares and within a few minutes we had been rounded up in netting or those constricting ropes on the end of a stick.

Turns out that there were 30 of us picked out for special treatment. There had been culls and indiscriminate slaughtering in the past as our predecessors has testified but we thought that our value to attract tourist dollars, or Monkey Business as we called it, far outweighed a bit of overpopulation and bad behaviour.

Monkeys will be Monkeys was another of our witticisms.

We crouched and held onto each other in the darkness of the load bay of the van as it lurched and rolled down the steep mountain road towards, we knew not where. After a short drive the doors were thrown open and we were herded into wooden crates through which the outline of a large aircraft loomed out of the dazzling daylight.

The boxes containing us thirty now disgruntled monkeys, sensing that a cull was not the purpose, were dragged up a conveyor belt into the belly of the cargo plane and soon after a strange light headed sensation meant that we were airborne.

The flight dragged out for hours before we felt an ear drum bursting change of pressure and a loud and rude bump of wheels back on earth.

Wherever we had been sent to was bloody cold, damp and very green which was a shocking turnaround to what we had been used to up on The Rock.

A banner in the Customs Room bore the wording of "Welcome to Scotland". It meant nothing although Benjamin and Rooney recognised the thistle emblem from the clothing of a ginger haired touring party back home that we had had some fun with some years ago.

After a short road journey we were dumped into the inhospitable environment of a fenced compound with a sorry excuse for trees and a pale imitation of a rocky outcrop. This, it appears, was to be our permanent residence from here on in, our penalty for delinquent monkeying around on the Rock of Gibraltar.

(written ahead of the deportation of 30 Barbary Monkeys from Gibraltar to Blair Drummond Safari Park, Stirling, Scotland on the grounds of persistent bad behaviour)