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Week before last, there were some peculiar life-forms slithering about on the banks of Loch Ness. There were the usual ghouls skulking around the pink castellated mansion where Alastair Crowley used to live (interesting bloke, Crowley, but ultimately a bit of a knob-end); there were those, both artistes and crowd-members, attending the Rock Ness festival. My girlfriend flew up to meet me and said that she sat next to someone who drew her disdain with his pitiful attempts to model himself on Keith Flint; same piercings, same tattoos, everything. (It was, of course, Keith Flint. The Prodigy were headlining that night); and there was the bloke who, for over 30 years, has been living in a camper van, observing the loch for anything that might be monsterish, and has, in all that time, seen absolutely nowt along those lines. No humps, no craning plesiosaur necks, no fins, nothing.
Yet there he stays. And at Drumnadrochit, on the opposite bank, there's the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre, which does an admirably thorough job of debunking the Nessie myth; if you've come all this way hoping to see the monster, it says, then you're an irredeemably deluded fool who deserves to be fleeced fifteen quid for a Nessie draught excluder in the gift shop at The Clansman.

I wasn't there to see the monster, even if I did take a boat-trip to Urquhart Castle and found it impossible to stop searching the waves for shadows, and even if I did spend a small fortune in the gift shop (how could I not, when the bottle of Clynelish that was selling for fifty quid in Inverness could be had in there for thirty?). I'd been teaching at a writers’ retreat in the hills and was, after it, having a few days holiday in the Highlands; haggis and Black Isle ale, single malts outside pubs on mountain passes, deer-spotting, losing two pints of blood to midges, getting lardy on breakfasts of Stornoway black pudding, that kind of thing.

I went over to Skye and gawped at the Cuillin mountains, and went out on a boat hoping to see the sea-eagles, and see them I did; wingspan of ten feet, feathered Cessnas, huge birds, blacking out the sky as they swooped down on fish, their giant talons swinging out like the wheels of an aeroplane, the beat of their wings whipping up the goosebumps and heartbeat. Awesome. And I saw eagle-owls, too; a man collecting for a charity had two of them tethered to a pole in Inverness town centre. Hunting birds, he told me; we have a bit of a fox problem in my area. They eat foxes? I asked. Favourite prey, he said. Think of that; a bird that eats dogs. A bird that preys on dogs. Doesn't seem right. How wondrous is that?

There's an ancient Hebrew proverb, which goes something like: Every day, we walk sightless amongst miracles. It refrained through my head, when I was in the Highlands, and was the spur to constant marvel. We take too much for granted, don't we? Why would a man, I asked myself, spend most of his adult life in a leaky caravan looking out for a creature that doesn't exist when he could be filling his years being perpetually astonished at those that do? At, say, the fourth-largest raptor in the world, or at the bird that attacks and eats foxes. There is endless wonder in those two creatures alone. But, of course, that feller himself is something close to miraculous; the wishes and yearnings that have prompted him to eschew the societal mainstream and repudiate the tedious imperatives of a work-led existence and the predictable trajectory of living, they too contain something in them of the marvellous. I like that feller, and what he does, and I sincerely hope he's rewarded; give him a glimpse, just one glimpse, of a hump or a neck or a fin or a tail, let him see, just for one moment, something in the loch's black waters that is not otter or branch or popping gas-bubble or swimming stag. Even the midge is a miniature miracle of biological engineering; the way the female, on finding you, emits a chemical message to other midges, telling them to come and bite you too. Such altruism is rare and special. Such selflessness to ensure species-survival is to be admired. Aye, but I still squish the little bastards whenever I find them feeding on me.

Our plane back home was at first delayed for several hours and then eventually cancelled, and we had to get a flight to Gatwick and then board a bus for Birmingham and what should've been a five hour journey took fourteen hours and, as always happens whenever I take a long-haul flight or have to hang around an airport for several hours, I was crippled by a cold for a week or so; cough, snot, headache, the vile and exhausting works. No doubt there are bacteriologists who would see the infinitesimal bugs that are making me feel this way as miraculous things too, but I just want them gone. I want to get stuck into the venison haggis and bottle of Tobermory that I brought back with me. I'm sick of Lemsips and co-codamol. Want to see monsters? Come peer into my sputum. That's where they are.
© Niall Griffiths 2009

Niall gets bitten by the Loch Ness bugs

Monster munch