Mr Sunnyshine

Mr Sunnyshine crawled out of my psyche one day. He's a monkey of the fez-wearing cymbal-playing variety, and he runs a bar in my house. When I'm out. His regular customers are the Pea and the Bean, the Pig in Jeans (who mis-heard a Stevie Wonder lyric - "Ma Cherie Amour, pretty as a pig in jeans") and the local feral cats Meringue and Sooty.
Like all bars, trouble can sometimes flare up (often in the form of the Cheese Brothers) but bouncer Jimmy the Hotdog - a terra-cotta coloured rolled-up mattress from under the stairs, can take care of business. There's also Mouth, a wooden statue from Botswana who writes lyrics for Coldplay.
So where did all this come from? Well, my wife was suffering from acute depression and I was trying all kinds of spirit-lifting ploys to bolster the pharmaceutical efforts. So I came up with a little song:
A little green pea lived on a dish
with his friend Eugene a little red bean
and they rolled on the dish next to the spoon
and every night they looked at the moon
and the moon said
little green pea come and live with me
and little red bean you can come too
so they slid down the spoon and landed on the moon
and everybody had some tea
Then one morning we were watching TV in bed, and a shaft of sunlight came glinting through the window, just as a toy monkey was onscreen. My cry of "It's Mr Sunnyshine" was mis-construed, but in a joyously cosmic way.
The rest is history, as is a scrappy cartoon strip that I recently found again, having written it off as lost when moving house.
So it seems Mr Sunnyshine may be due for a comeback...