Good evening Lums,
Who can remember Gonks? Those lovable fairground giveaways from the 70s, a golden age when you could get your picture taken with a terrified monkey, take home a goldfish in a polythene bag and purchase toy cigarettes that glowed at the end when you sucked on them.
A Gonk, if you need reminding , and apologies for jumping straight into the biology of one, was a toilet roll, wrapped in a dubious day-glo furry material that was undoubtedly harmful to 99% of organisms and had a half life of a million or so years. They had comedy paper eyes stuck on the front, normally their only facial feature. These were usually the first to go, giving the unfortunate creature the look of a crow pecked corpse that had wronged the King of the Gonks and swung from his castle gates, Castle Gonk, probably. They had oversize cardboard feet and sometimes a little tuft of hair, which was packed with carcinogenic qualities and the No1 reason for the rise in child asthma. After the eyes, a middle aged Gonk, say one about 20 minutes old, would begin to suffer gonk pattern baldness. An unwrapping of its hairy pelt because its securing dab of glue had dried up and lost its bite.
I don't know where they originated from, they didn't have a TV show like the Wombles or Banana Splits, they had just always been there, visiting once a year with the fairground gypsies. Then they disappeared, like the Mayans, no trace, no mass Gonk graves or Gonk memorabilia turning up on Antiques roadshow. Their place eventually was taken behind the cocunut shys by inflatable hammers and big annoying balloons on an elastic band.
Even finding a picture was difficult, the specimens displayed above are with the Gonkkenheim museum, I had to get special permission just to think about this rubbish, not from the museum, from my mental health therapist.
Sometimes , in Spain or somewhere I would see what I thought was an evolutionary offshoot of the gonk, a bendy, mouldable blob, with those familiar friendly eyes. These creatures were usually full of flour, I know that because my daughter tried to bring one back into the UK but it burst, actually , exploded is more accurate, all over a number of humourless passengers on the plane. At least, I think it was flour, that's what the Colombian fella that sold us it at the airport said.
The Furby I think is some kind of a relation, part machine, a bionic gonk I guess, but unable to jump over buildings and run at 60 miles an hour, it could flap its little stubs about and wobble energetically on its feet. It was meant to have the gift of speech and be able to learn language as we spoke to them over time, like a sinister mechanical parrot, learning all our secrets, hearing all, knowing all. In reality I've since discovered they left the gonk mechanical anthropomorphous engineering facility with only about 100 words programmed into their little gonk brains. So, you could chat away to it like a lonely widow, read it everything from Boswell to Billy Connollys Gullibles Travels and after 25 years it would still only be able to squack" Furby wuv" " Furby Worried" and "Please Stop".
Those frightening little troll dolls from the 90s are sometimes referred to as Gonks, which is plainly ridiculous, they are a much closer relation to Smurfs.
Lang may yer Lum Reek
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