A sad tale

Once upon a time in a deep, deep loch in the beautiful north of Scotland lived two happy monsters. Lets call them Mr and Mrs Nessie, as the names they call each other are rather hard to pronounce. They caught fish, swam and dived in the loch and laughed together, playing games to wind up those silly looking people who wandered around on the banks of their home. Mrs Nessie is much, much better at staying hidden, and given her colouring, that's quite an achievement.

However, after a few thousand years in the same loch, Mr Nessie's curiosity overcame him, and he started to plan a trip south, to see some of the places that the people who came to try and see him came from themselves. Mrs Nessie did not approve of this idea, and it led to a very serious argument and a proper falling out, not something they'd really ever faced before. Mr Nessie was so angry that Mrs Nessie didn't support his plans that he wouldn't listen to a word she said, and eventually she stopped talking to him completely. He realised that the loch just wasn't big enough for both of them any more.

So off he went, all alone, touring the Cairngorms, then south into Perthshire, and one day he ventured into the city of Stirling. Now I should at this point tell you that Mr Nessie has a very sweet tooth, so while in Stirling he popped into a wee sweet shop, and liked it so much he stayed all summer. He got himself a comfy spot in the window, where he could watch all the people passing, none of whom had any idea who he really was, he stayed so still (a skill honed over thousands of years to a level not known in the human race) they had no idea he was really alive. It suited the shop keeper as many of the people who stopped to look at Mr Nessie in his window came in to buy sweets, and Mr Nessie was allowed to eat as many sweets as he wanted at nights, so it was really quite a good arrangement for everyone.

But after a while he started to develop something which might best be described as claustrophobia. After so long in a vast loch, the walls of the wee shop seemed to be closing in on him, and he said his farewells to the shopkeeper and continued his journey, with a few bags of sweets with him, just to keep him going. I don't know where he went, perhaps he continued south to Lake Windermere to get a bit of space to swim, or maybe he fancied seeing the sea, certainly lots of scope for a swim there.

Back up north, Mrs Nessie was starting to miss him badly. The loch seemed so big and empty without him, and by the beginning of October she could stand it no longer and set off south to try and find him, and persuade him to come home. She tracked him for a month through the Cairngorms and Perthshire, and into the wee sweet shop in Stirling, but he'd already left. There she waits, her sad eyes at odds with the festive hat the shopkeeper asked her to wear as a disguise. She doesn't know where Mr Nessie went either, and her plan now is to wait a few months and hope if he comes back for a snack. She's already decided that she'll head back home then, whether she finds him or not. These southern places are so crowded and busy, and full of hard concrete and stone and noise, not like her beloved home at all, and there's only so much heartbreak you can hide in plain sight.