by Dom Joly
As we walked back to the hotel I had to try to explain to the kids why a man was drunkenly punching another man in the face while a woman hit the same man with a handbag.
Alcohol and weak genes,’ I said.
I didn’t know whether they understood and I didn’t care. I just wanted to go to bed.
The next morning we woke up and everyone seemed to be in better moods. The sun was shining and Inverness looked rather lovely in the dappled morning sunlight.
To get everyone in the mood and get them up to speed on the basic legend, I showed them the Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World episode on ‘Lake Monsters’. I was a little bit worried that it might freak them out and that they wouldn’t want to go to the loch, but they spent the whole time howling with laughter at what people wore in 1980.
Stacey and I laughed along, remembering some of our own eighties faux pas. There was me with my crimped hair and make-up, and her with the Princess Di flick and then the perm, oh God, the perm . . .
Down we went to breakfast for the usual joyless UK-hotel experience. Having passed on the heart-attack buffet, I asked for a cappuccino and was stared at as though I’d just demanded moon rock. Surely we all know about coffee now, even up here? The fifteen-year-old boy in charge of breakfast eventually agreed to go next door to the bar and ask. He was soon back, however.
‘The manager says it’s impossible.’
I gave up and sat down to nibble on a tough croissant. Parker trapped Jackson’s leg between their chairs and gave it a little squeeze. Jackson started screaming. Everyone in the room looked up from their troughs and started staring.
‘Is that the guy from I’m a Celeb . . . ?’ asked a scrawny mother of four potential burglars on the next-door table, as though I wasn’t there.
‘No,’ replied the multi-earringed father out on a rare bout of parole. ‘What would he be doing staying here?’ I had to admit that he had a point. Even in the Congo I’d managed to get a cappuccino.
A double-decker bus drove past the window. It had a huge advert for Celebrity Big Brother on Five. This would have been an encouraging sign of modernity had the show not ended five weeks previously . . .
We drove towards Loch Ness. We were on our way monster-hunting and I didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were going to do. We stopped at a place that had a statue of Nessie outside it. We got a couple of photographs and the kids wanted to know whether we were done now we’d found it.
They insisted on going into the shop that was like a Scottish mega-mart. Anything was Nessied up and for sale. There were Nessie hats, Nessie humps, Nessie shirts, Nessie fridge magnets, Nessie posters and . . . Nessie everything. There was also everything Scottish you would never want. The kids went mental and bought silly tartan hats, stickers, stuffed toys. I tried to appeal to Stacey but she had gone all misty-eyed and Scottish and reminded me that both sides of her Canadian family – the MacDougalls and the Johnstones – were from here. She started buying books called things like Your Clan Guide and wanted tartan from each side. I was going to be bankrupted in seconds by monsters and ancestry.
My phone beeped indicating that I had a text. It was the features editor at the Sun, Caroline. She’d read a Tweet that I’d posted asking anyone for help in finding people to talk to about Nessie. She had sent me a list of every nutter – sorry, ‘specialist’ – in the area. I looked down the list.
The first one was a guy called Steve. He was the man who had jacked in his job as a burglar-alarm installer and now lived on the shores of the loch in a former mobile library. He earned his living making little figurines of Nessie while keeping a permanent watch on the loch for the ‘beastie’. I felt a little guilty when I saw his name.
About twelve years ago, just before we started filming Trigger Happy TV, Sam Cadman and I made a recce trip up to Loch Ness. We were looking into doing some filming in the area and were driving around thinking of ideas. We heard about this guy in his little mobile home and, after a rather long session in the local pub, came up with a plan. Using driftwood, we made the shapes of an enormous pair of clawed feet. We attached these to two poles and then we waited for the lights in the beach hut to go out. When they did we approached stealthily and wandered all around the thing making ‘Nessie prints’. We never hung around to see the excitement the next morning, but I’d always felt a little guilty. I rang the number and a relaxed voice said ‘Hello’ after about ten rings.
‘Hi, is that Steve?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it is. Who’s wanting to know?’ asked the relaxed voice.
‘Hi, my name is Dom and I’m writing a book on monsters. I’m currently up in the Loch Ness area and was wondering if I could pop by and have a chat with you?’ I tried to sound like a friendly non-judgemental type of guy.
‘Well, that would have been great but there’s just one little problem. I’m currently lying on a beach in Thailand.’
This was a turn up for the books. It seemed that there was decent money to be made in Nessie-figurine making. I thanked Steve and neglected to mention our earlier half-meeting in the shape of fake footprints.
I rang the next name on the list. It was a man called Tony Harmsworth. He answered straight away.
‘Hello.’
‘Hi, is that Tony Harmsworth?’
‘It is he. Who are you?’
‘My name is Dom and I’m writing a book about monsters and I was given your name by a journalist as someone I should talk to about Nessie.’
‘Ah, well, yes, I’m definitely someone you should talk to. Unfortunately I’m currently laid up in bed with a bad back. How long are you up here for?’
‘Not long I’m afraid.’
‘Then it’s not going to be possible as I’m totally immobile at the moment.’
Things were not going well with my investigations. Then Tony had a suggestion.
‘You should go and see Adrian Shriner at the Loch Ness Exhibition in Drumnadrochit.’ I thanked Tony and hung up because the family had just come out of the shop laden down with their Scottish booty. We tried to cram it all into the Mercedes’ boot before heading off down the loch to Drumnadrochit.
The Loch Ness Centre & Exhibition was not hard to miss. We parked up next to a pond containing another mock-up statue of Nessie and wandered inside past a small yellow submarine that looked like it was straight out of the adventures of Tintin. Tintin did in fact come to Scotland, although not to Loch Ness. He headed up to the ‘Black Island’, where he ended up discovering that the Bigfoot-type animal that so terrified locals was a gorilla used by counterfeiters to keep nosey people away.
We entered the exhibition: six rooms featuring slideshows, video clips and exhibits, all lit in quite a slick manner. It’s pretty professional. The problem was that I had come here for some monster stories. Although the whole place is sold on ‘Nessie’, the entire exhibition does its very best to deconstruct the myth and leave you at the exit wondering why you bothered to come to Loch Ness. It seemed that Adrian Shriner was not a believer – not any more, anyhow.
I met him in the vast shop through which you’re channelled to get back to your car. He certainly looked the part – a crazy long beard and sporting the full tweed. He was the epitome of a mad professor.
I’d left my ‘Dom Joly Monster Hunter’ card at the entrance and it seemed to have done the trick. He was happy to tell me about how he got started.
‘Essentially I’m a lazy man and I saw monster-hunting as a quick path to glory. People might feel that going down into the depths of the loch in a tiny submarine was brave, but it’s a lot easier than hiking to the North Pole.’ I liked Adrian. He had a twinkle in his eye and was clearly a smart guy. When he’d first come to Loch Ness, in the late sixties, the world had pretty much been explored and explained. Monster-hunting was a way to have an adventure while also cocking a snook at established science.
He admitted that he had started off as a very keen Nessie enthusiast but was now more interested in working out what the famous sighting
s actually were. He had become a sceptic.
Age is a great rationalizer,’ he said, chuckling.
Looking around the shop, however, it was clear that he was making a great living from Nessie, whether or not it existed.
The family was getting restless again and complaining that they were hungry. I sighed and said goodbye to Adrian before getting back into the family wagon. We drove past Urquhart Castle, a beautiful ruin that sits on the shores of the loch. This was the setting of the famous ‘humps’ photo taken by Peter MacNab in 1955. I’d read a book called The Loch Ness Story, written – surprisingly – by BBC reporter and Nessie enthusiast Nicholas Witchell. He’s probably best known for remarks Prince Charles made about him, having forgotten he had a microphone on: ‘I can’t bear that man. I mean, he’s so awful, he really is . . .’
Witchell was and is firmly convinced of Nessie’s existence. He had MacNab’s account of the moment the photo was taken.
I was returning from a holiday in the north with my son and pulled the car up on the road just above Urquhart Castle. It was a calm, warm, hazy afternoon. I was all ready to take a shot of Urquhart Castle when my attention was held by a movement in the calm water over to the left. Naturally I thought of the ‘Monster’ and hurriedly changed over the standard lens of my Exacta (127) camera to a six-inch telephoto.
As I was doing so a quick glance showed that some black or dark enormous water creature was cruising on the surface. Without a tripod and in a great hurry I took the shot. I also took a very quick shot with another camera, a fixed-focus Kodak, before the creature submerged.
I remembered seeing that photograph when I was a kid. I tried to tell my kids about it but they needed food and were not in the slightest bit interested. We continued on until we reached the end of the loch at Fort Augustus. We parked up and went to the Bothy for lunch. I ordered haggis and felt like a bit of a tourist but I didn’t care. I genuinely love haggis and have it as often as I can. My kids asked me what was in it and I started to try to explain but they looked properly ill so I stopped. Do Scots really eat haggis? From what I saw in Inverness, the national diet seems to be chips and curry sauce washed down with a deep-fried Mars Bar and a fag. (This is the moment when, if you’re Scottish, you get all angry and put the book down to Tweet some abuse at me – but why do you guys do this? If someone abuses the English, we just laugh it off or invade you . . .)
We left Fort Augustus and drove back to Inverness. The kids were annoyed that we hadn’t seen Nessie and wanted to hit the pool. I took a quick look to check that the tattooed Geordie wasn’t in the hot tub. It was all clear. I got the kids ready again and took them down. The smell of chlorine was particularly strong but at least there was nobody about. I hopped into the hot tub only to find that it had become a cold tub overnight. Meanwhile the kids jumped into the pool but then got out quickly rubbing their eyes in pain and crying. Somebody had just dumped a vat of chlorine in the water and it was completely un-swimmable. We retreated to our room, giving the brain-dead mullet behind the poolside front desk an evil look that didn’t even register.
I tried to book us a restaurant for supper but everywhere was full. I just couldn’t understand it: surely Inverness isn’t that popular? Then I found out that it was Valentine’s Day. I was slightly mortified and considered bluffing my way through, as Stacey appeared not to know either. In the end I came clean. Fortunately neither of us are really Valentine’s obsessives so it wasn’t too much of a disaster. We did, however, have to eat downstairs, alone in the bar. I munched on my distinctly unromantic carb fest of chicken balti (mostly potato) with chips and rice. Stuffed, we staggered up to our twin beds that the hotel had so kindly provided for our romantic evening. We ended our Valentine’s night propped up in separate beds playing Scrabble together on iPads.
When we’d been driving about I’d spotted a sign advertising ‘Nessie Cruises’ on the loch, and I’d booked us a passage for the following day. The kids were a little bit worried that Nessie might attack us but everyone eventually agreed to the trip.
The next morning we left Inverness again and headed off towards the loch. On the way Parker asked Siri, the ‘brainbox’ who lives in my iPhone, whether Nessie exists. Siri was pretty adamant: ‘No. The Loch Ness Monster is a mixture of misidentification and hoaxes.’
We caught the eleven o’clock cruise. We’d had two alternatives – a two-hour trip that included a stop-off at Urquhart Castle, or the one-hour ‘basic’. We opted for the two-hour version. I was astonished to find that the boat was packed. It was low season but there were maybe a hundred people paying twelve pounds a pop, and there were five trips a day. Somebody was making a hell of a lot of money out of something that probably didn’t exist. I looked around us – there were Italians, Russians, Indians, Cockneys, Martians . . .
The cruise kicked off with some God-awful Scottish ‘folk’ music.
I presumed that this had to be the ‘magic’ of Bruce Macgregor, as his CD was for sale to anybody suffering from a spot of tone-deafitis. When Bruce had finished, on came a rather unexcited recorded commentary. I wanted to hear all about Nessie and where various sighting had taken place. This, after all, was the only reason people were here. Nobody in Japan woke up in the morning and planned their dream trip to Loch Lomond . . . Well, maybe they did, because they like their whiskey, but you get my point. Everyone round the world has heard of the Loch Ness Monster and this is why they were here.
While the actor hired to read the script told us about what birds we could see on the loch, I drifted off and looked at the boat’s depth finder. The water was currently 727 feet deep: that’s seriously deep. Parts of Loch Ness are deeper than the North Sea. I drifted back into consciousness in time to hear the actor get scientific and start telling us about the ‘Great Glen’, the geological fault that tore right across Scotland. Loch Ness, like the Okanagan, was a glacial trough. Then Bruce Macgregor came back on and several people on board looked close to suicide as they realized that they would be stuck on this hell boat for some time longer.
We went up top on to the open roof, where we listened to the actor, clearly struggling with the dullness of the text, tell us that badgers could be found in the surroundings. Parker and I looked around for lifeboats. Just as it couldn’t get any worse, it did. Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ came on.
The only real mention of the monster that had brought us to this loch in the first place was in a series of ‘monster toys’ available to purchase on board. These monsters, however, were known as ‘Jessy’ not ‘Nessie’. I presumed that someone had bought the copyright to Nessie, but Jessy was not the best alternative. Essentially everybody on board was there looking for a ‘Big Jessy’.
As we approached the castle the boat went past it before swinging round to starboard to dock. I looked out of the window and spotted the wake: a curious corkscrew-type affair that looked just like the ‘humps’ in the Peter MacNab photograph. Curiously it was in almost exactly the same position as it had been in the photo. The rest of the loch was flat calm and our wake did make a very effective set of humps. There was no boat in the Peter MacNab photo but maybe it had disappeared behind the castle, as ours had done? Like almost everything else in the world of monsters . . . I hadn’t the foggiest.
We docked at Urquhart Castle and the foreign hordes, who’d never managed its conquest when it was a ‘working’ castle, offloaded and swamped the place.
I spoke to a man who looked like he was a monster-hunter. I judged this by the fact that he was alone, clearly felt personal hygiene was for scientists and was wearing a T-shirt proclaiming that ‘Nessie Exists!’
He told me that that there was an enormous underwater cave under the rock shelf supporting the castle. This, he told me, was where the creatures lived and how they avoided the extensive sonar scans that had raked the loch. Ogopogo was also supposed to live in a cave, under Rattlesnake Island. I told my new friend about this and he whipped out a notebook and started asking me a series of questions. He was
writing down my answers in a fairly unintelligible scrawl, his tongue hanging out of his mouth in concentration. He told me that he had several photographs of Nessie that ‘nobody has seen’. I asked him why he hadn’t shown them to anybody. He told me that he wasn’t ready: he was getting all his facts and putting them together into a damning exposé that would blow the story wide open.
‘Did you know that, after the first photograph was taken in 1933, the police were ordered by the government to make sure that they stopped anyone attacking the creature?’ He looked me straight in the eyes. I admitted that I had not been aware of this fact.
The man smiled. ‘I’ve got lots of facts, I have.’
I asked him if I could have his email to ask him some further questions. He stopped smiling and looked petrified.
‘Email? You don’t want to use that . . . Ever.’ He looked around the boat suspiciously.
‘Why ever not?’ I asked.
‘They track everything I do. They came to my house once and broke in. I fought a man off with a stick. They were from the government.’ He was whispering now, clearly concerned that the small Japanese man sitting next to him was one of MI5’s top agents. I thanked him for the chat and backed away to the mental safety of my family and we spent the rest of the cruise looking for badgers.
In the car I looked down my list of Nessie contacts. There was one for a guy called Miko who was supposedly the head of the ‘Nessie Fan Club’. Not expecting too much from this one, I rang the number and spoke to him. He was very chipper and suggested that we should meet up in the car park of Drumnadrochit.
My family had tired of monster-hunting and wanted to go to the cinema. I dropped them off in Inverness and then drove back to the loch for my meeting with Miko.
I sat in the car park waiting for my contact like some curious Cold War contact. A couple of locals wandered past and stared at me hard, trying to work out if I was a German dogger. Finally a blue car with a Finnish flag on the back pulled in and circled the car park before parking up alongside me. I lowered my window, as did the driver of the blue car. There were two people inside, a man and an elderly woman. The elderly woman looked at me and then asked me if I was Dom. She sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s grandmother.