The poem comes to mind right now because I have just visited a news website that offered me all the headlines, all the man-made merriment from Ukraine to climate change via inflation, bush fires and Trump. I ignored the lot. Instead, I clicked on what I guarantee was by far the most popular headline of the day: "The Loch Ness Monster Video: Best footage in decades." And my question is why?
There is no Loch Ness Monster. I know it, you know it, and even the man who is quoted as saying "best footage in decades" and whose title is Keeper of the Official Loch Ness Monster Register (I am not making this up. His name is Gary Campbell) knows it. You, he and I have all seen the grainy old photos of what purports to be the Loch Ness Monster and we have all recognised them as deliberate fakes or obvious illusions. And yet I clicked on the headline. Again, I ask why.
The "best footage in decades" was taken by a couple who were staying in a cottage above Loch Ness. Unusually for Loch Ness, indeed for Scottish lochs in general, it shows glassy calm water. And moving across the glassy calm is a widening V-shaped wake, remarkably similar to the widening V-shaped wake made by a duck or ducks swimming across the glassy calm water. The film is of too poor a quality and taken from too far away to make out any duck or ducks, but there's no doubt at all that that's what's happening here. In other words, no surprise. It's another Nessie non-event just as I knew it would be when I clicked on it. And yet I clicked on it. Why?
The best known Loch Ness photo is the one of a purported head and neck. Aged seven I identified this creature. It was a plesiosaur.
Like many a little boy, I went through an intense dinosaur phase. To this day I know my stegosaurus from my triceratops and I know and can spell the pterodactyls that soared above them with nightmare beaks and the wingspans of gliders. These creatures sang to my infant soul. It's as if I'd always known them.
The Jurassic sea was ruled by the long-tailed, sleek-bodied, long-necked, small-headed and almost limitlessly toothed plesiosaur. It was the archetypal sea monster, the sort of beast that sailors who knew nothing of dinosaurs imagined seizing their ship, the sort of beast that Hollywood drew on when it made Alien, the sort of beast that St George slew. It's what the Anglo-Saxons called a worm. It's what the early cartographers drew in regions they knew nothing of. "Here be dragons" said the legend. The plesiosaur was a dragon.
And though plesiosaurs are 65 million years extinct, dragons retain their grip on our minds. Game of Thrones is among the most successful television series of the 21st century. It's awash with dragons. Harry Potter is the best seller since the Bible. It's awash with dragons. I cheerfully scoff at both. I consider them trash. But still, I clicked on the headline. The rational mind and the wishful subconscious are two very different animals.
As Thomas Hardy knew. He was emphatically no Christian, but here's how he finished his poem.
So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,
"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.
