The Domestic

Monkey madness in Sophie White’s home

A“I knew that that Purple Monkey would never get out of this one alive”

head of a recent family trip, an email from playschool landed in my inbox. An innocent missive that I quickly identified as a harbinger of disaster. “Purple Monkey would love to go to Austria with you,” it said.

Purple Monkey is the resident teddy at playschool who goes home with one child every weekend and chronicles his adventures for a lovely scrapbook. We had never been honoured with Purple Monkey. The reason, I suspect, is that we, as parents, haven’t acquitted ourselves well since we began playschool.

We collect late. Our child has been known to bite the other kids. For Japan week, I gave him a pair of chopsticks to bring in — you can guess how that ended. In short, we are the shit parents.

There was no pressure to bring Purple Monkey, except for the internal pressure that comes with being a juggling, struggling millennial mother who already feels like she is failing miserably in the parenting stakes.

“We’d love to have him along. It’ll be fun,” I e-crowed back, knowing, even as I typed those words, that Purple Monkey would never get out of this one alive.

That’s just not the person I am — I would never manage to escort my child and a significance-laden stuffed animal to another country without something happening to one of them. “I may as well set fire to Purple Monkey right now,” I thought hopelessly.

Purple Monkey never even came into my possession — my minder lost him on Henry Street, within an hour of collecting him. Bollocks. Did I mention Purple Monkey was a family heirloom? “Lose the baby,” I cried, indicating the adorably gormless chunk of a second child in the pram, “don’t lose Purple Monkey!”

We were due to leave in 15 hours; there was a dead ringer for Purple Monkey on sale in town. I hadn’t packed or finished work. I popped a sedative and frantically related my plan to buy the lookalike to Himself. “It’s not like a replacement goldfish; they will know the difference,” was his reply.

Finally, I settled on bringing a different teddy, for whom I concocted an elaborate origin story, loosely based on The Holiday. Two bears swap lives over the holiday season and wind up falling in love with Jude Law and Jack Black.

Playschool was understanding, and accepted my grovelling. Then fast-forward to last week. I was just tucking into this veggie mac ‘n’ cheese when I got the call from Penneys, Purple Monkey had turned up, presumably looking for a bargain.