HUMPS in the water, eh?

I wish you could get a cream for that. Judiciously applied, such a salve might have saved us a whole lot of bother. We lay the blame for this disease at the otherwise sensibly shod feet of Mrs Aldie Mackay. She was the first Aldie to see the Loch Ness Monster in modern times, thus sparking a tourist boom and much Moon-addled nincompoopery to boot.

Watch the page go all wobbly as we waddle back through the mists of a time to a chilly day in April, 1933, when Mrs Mackay and her husband were travelling home by car from Inverness to Drumnadrochit. In the waters near Aldourie Castle, Mrs Mackay saw a hump. And the hump swam off. Mrs Mackay thought it was like a whale. Alex Campbell thought it a whopping great tale and he, a water bailiff by day and journalist by night, worked it into a fine exclusive for the Inverness Courier.

The rest, as they say, is history. Except that there was some history before that. In 565AD, to be exact, Columba – a full-time saint – was on his way to Inverness to spread the good news about Christianity when he met some Picts burying one of their number near the loch.

"What's going on here, like?" said Columba.

"He wiz mangled by a monster, ken?" said the Picts.

Intrigued, St Columba bravely sent one of his men to retrieve the dead fellow's boat and he too was about to be mutilated to his detriment until the holy one made the sign of the cross and commanded the beast to desist. Which it did. I see.

Still, if you believe in a benevolent deity, you'll believe anything. The account of this alleged incident wasn't written up for another 100 years, as the Inverness Courier was a bit slow back then.

Then the centuries passed (see your page wobbling again now) until Aldie's fateful sighting, which has its 80th anniversary on Sunday.

News is a funny beast. You get one story about a sinkhole swallowing a man, and suddenly dozens start to appear. It's as if they'd been awaiting their moment.

So it was with Nessie, who in 1933 must have thought: "Time to stir up these two-legged geeks again. I hope that weird baldie bloke with the cross isn't there. Gave me the willies last time."

Luckily though, it was just Aldie and her man. But the news stories multiplied and spread across the world, with yon iconic photie of a long neck and wee heid appearing the following year. Every picture or account is dogged by accusations of jiggerypokery and, true enough, nothing watertight has emerged from the loch. You'd think the sonar gubbins and camera lenses of 1000 bug-eyed believers would have turned up something by now.

And, of course, there's the suspicion it's all a conspiracy to attract tourists. Aldie was a hotelier, after all, and not a few witnesses since then have shared that sinister profession. But, then, the industry wasn't so global back in 1933 and far less reliant on PR. Perhaps poor Aldie was just mistaken. All she saw was a giant otter or a common or garden kelpie.

Or maybe all she saw was one of our dreams. We want to believe. Not necessarily in a suspected plesiosaur plashing ashore to mangle decent ratepayers and terrorise our village malls. But just something weird. Something out there. Anything to expand our horizons beyond the pointless working, eating and buying that constitutes our daily lives.

Sadly, Nessie is a cryptid. That's from the Greek meaning "hide" and refers to something whose existence is suggested by punters but not yet accepted by scientists.

Perhaps she's hiding because she doesn't have that much to offer. Most animals are pretty ovine or bovine, as it were. Even the most intelligent dog or chimp has limited ambition. A bone or banana and they're done.

Nessie probably suspects she'd be bunged in a zoo with the other dopes. So, rightly, she has remained out of sight, down in the deeps, way back in our subconscious minds, where the ghosts and monsters play.