Confession

Confession? If you are expecting me to confess to smoking crack cocaine or to masterminding a series of bank heists or to cross-dressing during shopping trips into Sheffield city centre the forget it! My confession goes back years to when I was a little lad of perhaps seven or eight.

My family were holidaying in Scotland. We had an old caravan (or trailer to Yanks) that appeared to be made from compressed cardboard. Crammed in the old car we managed to haul our mobile pre-war cardboard box on wheels all the way up to Inverness. It really was a Lynton Triumph! (name of caravan). Mind you with my three wrestling brothers in the back it didn't seem too triumphant. "Will you behave yourself!" our parents would yell intermittently.

So we made camp at the Inverness municipal site near to the old Inverness Thistle football ground and the ice rink. One day, dad decided to take us all for a drive down the southern shore of Loch Ness. This is an old military road and much less travelled than the road on the north shore. I guess we kids were excited because we had heard of the famous Loch Ness monster and we wanted to see it.

A third of the way down the lakeside - opposite Castle Urquart - we came through the pine trees to a wide bay and there as if by magic we saw grey humps moving through the water about fifty yards below. Dad stopped the car and we all got out watching the humps for perhaps three or four minutes before they disappeared beneath the surface.

The following day in the Inverness local paper there was a report about a sighting of "Nessie" from the castle ramparts opposite that bay at exactly the time that we came through the pine trees. Afterwards, maybe embarrassed, our parents tried to argue away what we had seen - as if believing in the Loch Ness Monster might shame them but I know what I saw that bright afternoon - forever imprinted in my memory - the mystery that is Nessie moving through the water - and this wasn't something I dreamed. It was there - clear as the apple trees in our garden... Seeing is believing. I haven't seen God but I saw that "monster".