NOT a "swimming elephant"

Nessie: the Loch Ness monster.

Can I confess to a lifelong fascination with the old girl? Ever since, as a child, I read a luridly-illustrated and quite terrifying "Haunted Houses of Old England" (sic) book, I've loved the idea that, somewhere out there in the peat-colored waters of the loch, there was something that science couldn't explain?

Now somebody's trying to argue that sightings of Nessie might be of a swimming elephant. I ask you: does this look like Dumbo?

















Or this?


Or this?



I don't know if she's out there or not, but if she is, I hope they never kill or capture her.

I'll admit that images like this give me a wonderful, child-like frisson.

ps: Greatest literary take on Nessie ever: "Synchronicity II" by The Police (wherein Sting also has the good taste to steal from Robert Burns). Chilling.

Another suburban family morning.
Grandmother screaming at the wall.

We have to shout above the din of our Rice Crispies
We can't hear anything at all.
Mother chants her litany of boredom and frustration,
But we know all her suicides are fake.

Daddy only stares into the distance
There's only so much more that he can take.
Many miles away something crawls from the slime
At the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.

Another industrial ugly morning
The factory belches filth into the sky.
He walks unhindered through the picket lines today,
He doesn't think to wonder why.
The secretaries pout and preen like cheap tarts in a red light street,
But all he ever thinks to do is watch.
And every single meeting with his so-called superior
Is a humiliating kick in the crotch.
Many miles away something crawls to the surface
Of a dark Scottish lake.

Another working day has ended.
Only the rush hour hell to face.
Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes.
Contestants in a suicidal race.
Daddy grips the wheel and stares alone into the distance,
He knows that something somewhere has to break.
He sees the family home now looming in the headlights,
the pain upstairs that makes his eyeballs ache.
Many miles away there's a shadow on the door
Of a cottage on the shore
Of a dark Scottish lake...............