In a small Scottish inn, we spot hints of the coming pandemic before the average person hears the news
It's a master class for about 25 fundraising professionals. It starts Monday, March 2, 2020; we meet and mingle the night before. Our classroom overlooks Loch Ness. Highland cattle bagged in thick copper hair and lengthy-enough horns graze the sloping fields in front of The Inch, our inn and classroom. These animals are an ancient Scottish breed; we're staring at Neolithic-period meat and milk.
Loch Ness isn't all that wide. But it is the very, very, well-fine-not-really-all-that-implausibly deep home to the (please adopt this lovely word) "cryptozoological monster" touristically known in gift shops as Nessie.
And you know what, when you're teaching a master class?
The Nessie legend is an f*ing distraction. Delegates can't help glancing out the windows, hoping. Walk a few minutes to the nearby village of Fort Augustus: Nessie is unavoidable. Nessie burgers. Nessie squish toys in tartans. Loch Ness energy drinks: "Guzzle the damn stuff!!! You'll feel like a dragon trapped inside a fathomless lake for at least 10,000 years!" Nessie petrol. And Nessie boat patrol.
Along with meals, lodging and pitiless instructors yapping about expertise for 2.5 days, our master-class students get a complimentary boat trip up Loch Ness from Fort Augustus.
It's a sedate ride. A colony of feral goats chewing the scenery on the loch's sheer cliffs is the highlight; that, plus sunburn if you didn't bring covering.
In several places, the boat's windows offer a pasted-on Nessie silhouette. Through that silhouette, you can shoot your very own pretend "I saw Nessie" photo. Everyone does it. It's the highlight of the tour. The silhouette features a couple of arching black spines and the famously erect swan's neck topped by that fierce presumably-ancient fish-crushing head.
I notice that Simone has cornered one of our brightest, most eager master-class students. He's from the Czech Republic. Went to Harvard. Now back in his home country, where he's set on reforming public school education. The vision: to make the Czech Republic a superstar amongst post-Communist states, which ended almost 30 years ago. He's got grant funding, which puts a warhead on his missile (to slip back into Cold War terms).
Sim One lectures him throughout our one-hour ride re: her disgust with politics in America. She's not bothering with photos of Nessie. He's attentive, polite, calm, respectful. He's a remedy, too, I suspect. His unremitting, much-younger Czech attention span probably spares Simone's stomach a messy countdown.
She is spectacularly prone to seasickness.
More than once, within seconds, I've witnessed her explosive reactions to being afloat on any boat; on three continents.
Even on today's prim, flat lake, aboard a tub in the Scottish Highlands, with waves no higher than careless gestures, waves less formidable than a gent's pocket square, I can easily imagine Simone collapsing on the deck, eyes rolling up, gracelessly puking without caring much, like a wan fire hose.
So, PS: The cleaning crew for this Loch Ness tour boat wishes to thank the Czech Republic. Which I kept mistakenly calling Czechoslovakia in his presence, a political entity that dissolved peacefully on January 1, 1993. He was adoringly patient. He forgave me because I was clearly too old to castigate and my references were obsolete. My stamp collection was old, my atlas was old, my globe was old. I was an antique, too. I just needed to shut up and let the next generations have their say.