SocietyJanuary 10, 2025

My Greatest Trip: Eloping and Nessie hunting in Scotland

Senior writer

Summer reissue: Alex Casey recounts a reverse honeymoon that ended with a secret wedding.

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It was a sighting almost as rare as Nessie herself. Steve Feltham, aka The Nessie Hunter, who has been parked up Loch-side looking for the mythical monster for the last three decades, cautiously peeked out of his iconic caravan after hearing my peals of laughter through the Scottish sleet. He was wearing a woollen fisherman jumper, one hand holding his door ajar and the other holding a plate of piping hot oven pizza. I couldn’t help myself.

“Nessie Hunter!” I yelled, waving my bouquet back and forth. “We just got married!”

“Oh aye,” the Nessie Hunter shrugged and shut his door. If it’s not Nessie, he’s not interested.

Whether he wanted the information or not, The Nessie Hunter was one of the first people in the world to know about our secret nuptials. It had been months of planning, paperwork and biometric scanning, posting our passports away and speaking in code in case anyone was listening. “Do you think Joe is going to propose to you?” my best friend Zoe asked over the phone just a few days before we left, as I grabbed a nearby shelf to steady myself.

We had talked about getting married in the early years of our relationship, but the enthusiasm had waned over time – too expensive, too stressful, too many people to fret about. But with a big overseas trip on the horizon for our 10 year anniversary, the occasion felt right. I had initially pitched Vegas due to a love of sobbing to corny videos like this, but Joe had some gentle notes. He’s the Wozniak to my Jobs – I pace around in jeans and a turtleneck selling unhinged visions for the future, and he sits there quietly figuring out how to get any part of it done.

Not pictured: Nessie or the Nessie Hunter

Scotland made the most sense. It’s a place with deep ancestral roots for both of us, but particularly for me – my mother immigrated from Scotland to Aotearoa in 1988, and I’ve been lucky enough to make semi-regular trips back to see my extended family throughout my life. Gretna Green? A rich history of elopement, but too obvious. Loch Ness? Now we’re talking. I’m no Nessie Hunter but I have been obsessed with the place, and the monster, ever since my Dad found a giant scary “sheep” tooth near Urquhart Castle in the mid 90s.

Our classified information was shared with a select few – a woman in a lanyard at the Christchurch UK Visa Application Office, a woman with a neckerchief at Michael Hill Jeweller and, roughly 18,500 km away in Inverness, Karen the photographer and Audrey at the Inverness Registration Office. We got our passports back with the approved marriage visas just a few weeks before we were set to leave and, despite a close call when our friend Sam admired our colour-coded travel document folder, we had managed to keep the whole thing secret.

We had most of our big dream trip to do before the actual wedding, so it was like a honeymoon in reverse – Joe’s suit and my dress getting increasingly creased in every wonderful port. In Los Angeles we ate CBD gummies and greened out on The Mummy Ride, watched improv at UCB, ate breakfast at Canter’s deli everyday, saw the original Jaws shark at the Academy Museum and spotted high value celebrities such as Patti Harrison and Ray from Girls. I even fulfilled a podcast promise to plank (poorly) outside the Oppenheim Group on Sunset Boulevard.

Next we ended up in London with treasured old friends who cooked us dinner, fed us Walkers toffees and met up with us after our cringey touristy days at the Tower Bridge and the Tate. We went to Shepherd’s Bush to see the Queens Park Rangers play, and John Kirwan sat at the end of our row in a pair of statement glasses. Joe got a selfie with him, and I welled up at how small and cosy the whole entire world felt. John Kirwan, All Black, a part of our wedding!

Paris provided an even bigger VIP guest. King Charles was in town and we watched his royal cavalcade from the top of the Eiffel Tower before having a picnic under its twinkling lights (“quelle heure… do le lights come on?” I parlez-vous’ed hours earlier). We did the Louvre, the Pompidou, Musées de l’Orangerie et d’Orsay until mes yeux were fermé. Then back to London, then out to Stonehenge and Avebury for a pagan ritual, then a night in Cheltenham with Joe’s family, then Liverpool. Martin Freeman was shooting The Responder S2 outside our hotel – another esteemed guest.

All the while, we were picking up things for our wedding and having Zooms with Audrey in Inverness. It was on the Magical Mystery Tour bus, packed with people from all around the world forced to meekly sing ‘Yellow Submarine’ from behind their Covid masks, that we settled on the song to play while we signed the marriage documents. There was a couple from Mexico onboard celebrating their 40th anniversary, and they requested to play their wedding song between stops. I sobbed heartily all the way through ‘In My Life’ and we promptly yoinked it for our own playlist.

The Beatles walking us down the aisle, in a sense

We continued through our bucket list – Joe got his tour of Anfield, I got to see the shrunken head of a saint in Drogheda. We ate Taytos and drank Guinness in Dublin, walked in silence through the ancient tombs of Brú na Bóinne, and I took photos of myself using a functional “Thomas Crapper” toilet on the last remaining Whitestar Vessel at the Titanic museum in Belfast. At the Giant’s Causeway, a giant rock formation that looked like Maccas’s chips, we were the only people to spot a pod of dolphins doing water aerobics – our flower girls!

Eventually, we made it to Scotland to stay with my family, where we had one more crucial task to complete in Edinburgh before the big day. We had decided that we wanted to incorporate a quaich into the ceremony, an old Scottish tradition that marks the blending of families through everyone having a hoon on some whiskey out of an ornate pewter bowl. Alas, we spent too long staring at Dolly the Sheep at the museum and ended up rushing to grab one from a souvenir shop before getting the train home, burying it beneath hundreds of souvenir magnets and Greyfriars Bobby figurines.

Greyfriars Bobby was not able to attend the wedding

On our secret wedding day, my Aunty Rose and her partner Franek kindly drove us to the car hire place, by way of the adorably and violently-named “Kirkslap”, where my Mum was born. I blinked back tears in the back seat, knowing what was coming. Thinking we were just going on a leisurely scenic trip up north, my Aunty instructed us to visit the battlefields of Glen Coe, even printing us out the lyrics to ‘The Massacre of Glen Coe’, a song by The Corries about the brutal murder of the MacDonald Clan after they failed to pledge allegiance to William III and Mary II. New aisle song, perhaps?

Sadly, we didn’t have time to visit Glen Coe, because we barely had time for anything. The wedding was scheduled for 4pm at the Inverness Town House, and it was 3pm by the time we checked into our Loch Ness Hotel, a flurry of bags, shoes and ironing boards. I did my makeup with one eye trained on the Loch, determined to get an auspicious Nessie sighting on the big day. Sweet Joe Wozniak cautiously ironed his suit and my dress, a green number from Mina, and watched YouTube tutorials for a refresher on how to tie a tie.

It was only when we approached the Inverness Town House that I realised what Wozniak had pulled off in convincing me of a registration wedding, rather than my Jobs vision of getting married on a charter boat on the waters of Loch Ness (which was going to cost several thousand pounds). Coming from New Zealand, I had expected a crummy 70s corporate office, not an actual Disney castle topped with turrets and filled with stained glass, chandeliers, and swirling oak staircases. “PRIVATE EVENT. NO ENTRY” a sign outside read. We were chuffed.

Although they were all asleep on the other side of the world, our friends and family were all there with us. Joe’s Dad was there in his striped navy and yellow tie from his grandfather’s brass band uniform. His Mum was there in his woollen Hokitika socks. My family was there in the music – The Proclaimers for Mum, The Beatles for Dad. Our friends were there too – Sam and Sara in our tattered Grizzly totes, Summer in the handmade wallet I hastily threw at Joe to pay for parking, Zoe in the hot pink scrunchie I keep as a totem of comfort everywhere I go.

Audrey welcomed us at the door, and the photographer Karen helped Joe with his tie. Two women we had only ever met on Zoom, so warm with these total bamboozled strangers from New Zealand. Although we had booked the cheapest, smallest room, they told us we could get married wherever we wanted because nobody else was there. I immediately gravitated to the enormous chandelier-laden blood red banquet hall, before Joe suggested the cavernous space might look a bit weird with only two of us in it. Wozniak strikes again

We settled on The Chamber, an extremely ornate room famous for housing the first sitting of the British Cabinet outside of London in 1921, including then-Secretary of State Winston Churchill. 102 years later, an even more historic act: most tears cried by any person. What happened in that chamber felt equal parts sacred and embarrassing and shall remain a secret between me, Joe and Churchill’s ghost, but lets just say nothing gets the waterworks going between a small group of strangers in Scotland quite like ‘Sunshine on Leith’ on a UE Boom.

Wozniak was right: this room would have been too big. (Photo: Karen Thorburn)

Afterwards we took photos throughout the building, before convoying back to Loch Ness with the photographer and her husband Mark. This was where I was really expecting to get the money back – although it had been cheaper than a regular wedding, adding an elopement to our trip still cost us around $3000. Just one professional grade shot of Nessie in our wedding pictures would bring us back out of the red and onto the gravy train. Alas, even with the Nessie Hunter’s alluring freshly-baked pizza smells, the one invited guest was a no-show.

Our reception consisted of us returning to the hotel, throwing on jeans and jumpers, and going to the fancy hotel restaurant which looked out over the Loch. I couldn’t stop telling random people that we had just got married, which eventually led to the waiter bringing out a special custom dessert – my mastermind plan all along (and making money once again). He apologised profusely in a thick Highland accent, setting down an assortment of bite size desserts with “happy anniversary” written in swirly chocolate. Not technically untrue.

We waited up until New Zealand was waking up, and rang our families to tell them the news. Joe’s dad unleashed his thunderous catchphrase “HEDY LAMARR” in celebration, my mum thought I was ringing to say I finally got her Nessie shot, before bursting into tears. My dad was happy too, but was easily the fastest to pivot the conversation to what we had missed on the last few weeks of Celebrity Treasure Island. The next day we told all our friends, including some manic FaceTimes while we were cruising the waters of Loch Ness for one final search.

A lady took our photo on the boat, and I couldn’t help myself again. “We got married yesterday!” She smirked: “I thought so.”

Still not pictured: Nessie. (Photo: Karen Thorburn)

One of the great things about eloping is that you get to celebrate over and over again as you tell more and more people, and have them all react in their own unique way. On the drive home we stopped off at my Uncle Bernard’s house for dinner, and I tried to hide the ring until dessert. When we dropped the news, we got the best first wedding gift I could have ever imagined: an XXL bottle of Irn Bru from his cupboard. Aunty Rose had kittens about it, and put on a cracking lasagne feast with the perfect vanilla sponge cake covered in Smarties, sprinkles, and a fizzing firework candle.

Although we missed the emotional speeches and roasts you’d get at a big rowdy wedding, the people of Scotland stepped up in a huge way. Crammed at opposite ends of a bus to Celtic Park on our very last day in Scotland, a Glaswegian asked Joe why he was visiting. When he found out he came to Scotland to get married, it was like witnessing Billy Connolly in his heyday. “You need Jesus pal!” the man hollered. “I’m from Scotland and I won’t even get married here!” The bus roared with laughter as he wheezed. “Scotland… in October… for your HONEYMOON pal!”

Many receptions, many countries, many roasts

Once the whole country had finished laughing, we put half the vanilla sponge cake in a Tupperware back to London to continue our reception. Our old friends cooked us up a feast, draped us in lolly leis and we finally opened the wedding dancefloor with Abba, rendered in 65 million pixels in the scarily futuristic spectacle Abba Voyage. “Hello London,” waved digital Bjorn. “This is so fucked up,” Joe shrieked involuntarily. But boogying to ‘Dancing Queen’ with some of my oldest friends, just as we had done when we were young, sweet, only 17 etc, left me sobbing yet again.

Of course, there were even more celebrations to be had when we eventually made it home with a journal bursting full of memories, suitcases of Loch Ness swag and a credit card limit well and truly maxed out. And even though we didn’t get our Nessie sighting, I still like to think she was in on the whole thing. Three days after our wedding came reports of the “clearest evidence yet” ever captured of the mythical beast, and the very next day more sightings of a “black mass or hump” that was rendered by bystanders in this hilarious sketch. Coincidence, or trolling?

Either way, we’ll see you in 10 years for our vow renewal, wee beastie.

First published November 7, 2024.

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John Rillstone portrait by Adrienne Martyn, 1980 (additional design by Tina Tiller)

SocietyJanuary 10, 2025

Remembering my brother

Dougal Rillstone

Guest writer

John Rillstone portrait by Adrienne Martyn, 1980 (additional design by Tina Tiller)

Summer reissue: The photograph is striking and beautiful, but also disturbing – a reminder that my love for John was often entangled in shame.

The Spinoff needs to double the number of paying members we have to continue telling these kinds of stories. Please read our open letter and sign up to be a member today.

In the spring of 1980, in Dunedin, shortly before his death, someone took a photograph of my brother John. The photograph doesn’t look out of place today, but when it was taken it wasn’t ordinary. It shows John – in a white, Japanese styled, loose-fitting top and trousers, a bleached white crew-cut, his black beard closely cut – as a fearlessly gay man, at a time when his sexuality was illegal.

The photograph is both striking and beautiful, but also disturbing – not only for it being taken in such close proximity to his death, but as reminder that my love for John was often entangled in shame. My mother gave me the photograph years ago, and I have kept it since in the room where I read, tie fishing flies and sometimes write, where only those few who enter could see it.

I hadn’t thought about its provenance until my wife asked me if I knew who had taken it. She was reading Paul Moon’s book on the life of photographer, Ans Westra, and based on the book’s cover photograph of Westra, she suggested the image of John might have been taken by the same person: Adrienne Martyn.

That the photographs were taken by the same person was an improbable coincidence, but after a few days of having the Westra book near me I began to think she might have been right. An essence of the photographer appeared to infuse both. Still, when the frame was removed, it was a surprise to see Adrienne Martyn’s name on the back of the image.

I contacted Martyn, who now lived in Wellington where she continued to photograph people and buildings, asking whether she remembered the session with John, and if she had retained any of the negatives or proofs from it. Martyn replied right away – she had both proofs and negatives from the session and a clear memory of it. She had known he died shortly after the images were taken.

We exchanged emails about John and the images, and within a few days I had received two stunning new prints: a new one from the session, and a fresh image of the original, the one she told me John chose. The exchange and the 36 images she shared with me brought him close, in the most unexpected way.

The decades have stretched out since John’s death, but I keep his presence near me. On one wall of my room are eight photographs taken by him, and on the bookshelf are several of his books. I knew he had an interest in photography, and that he had worked on the film about the Burton Brothers – early New Zealand photographers – but it wasn’t until 20 or so years ago, when I took some of his photographs out of a folder that I realised what a fine eye he had.

As best I can tell, because he wrote nothing on the back of them, they were taken at the Ngaruawahia Music Festival, in 1973. They are sensual images that capture the essence of the era, full of love and the energy of youth, and they leave me wondering what happened to the beautiful people he caught on film.

The books I looked through again recently, hoping to find something of John on the pages, but found no marginalia that might have told me something of his thoughts, and when I held them to my nose and flicked through the pages all I could smell was the mustiness of old books.

There is something of him in the choices though. Some, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Crack Up and Under A Glass Bell by Anais Nin, are set in the era of Art Deco and jazz he admired. Others, like The Wild Boys by William Burroughs and Prater Violet by Isherwood, and books by James Baldwin are written by authors who were gay. John owned these books before it was clear to others that he was gay, and looking back, I imagine they offered him a sense of familiarity in the unfamiliar Southland of his youth.

The Gore of the 1950s and 60s was a conservative town in a conservative part of the country. We knew everyone who lived on our street, and there was only one house on it that we might not have been welcome to visit, unannounced. Few people or houses stood out from the crowd. It reads like a cliche now, but the boys and men played rugby, drank Speights and some bet on racehorses. Most of the men cycled to and from work, as did the women, who worked in offices, schools and shops in the brief time between leaving high school and getting married, young. Couples stayed married, although some women mysteriously left town to spend time away at Seacliff where they recovered from illnesses that went unexplained.

This caring community suited those that conformed but was a tough place for those like John who were born to be different.

John was born in Gore on the 26th of February 1952, three years and a couple of months after me. From then, until I moved, thirteen years later, into the converted garden shed adjoining the hen house in our backyard, we slept in beds just an arm’s length apart. We were, for those years, almost as close, and as far apart as it was possible for two boys to be.

I have many photographs from our early life in Southland, showing us together, some by rock-pools while on holiday in Riverton, and in front of our house in Wentworth Street; one with my pet-lamb, Frisky, standing with us on a daisy spotted lawn. There is another of us in Christchurch when we are older, a trip that would have been a major expedition at that time of our lives. In that photograph, and many others from our early years, we are wearing matching clothes; ironic, given how the way we dressed changed over the following years.

I sometimes wonder if the photographs have played a part in stealing away my memories of those early years together, because the events themselves are mostly locked away in an unopened vault in my memory. I remember the first trout I caught in the Mataura River when I was four, but nothing of John as a baby, suggesting perhaps that being self-absorbed is the natural state for a child.

I recall us playing with toy farm animals on the carpet at the end of our beds in the room we shared with Paul, our much younger brother. We built fences for the cows and sheep with little brown bricks, and often sat for long periods, constructing a make-believe world of farms and happy families. The sessions often ended in chaos, with me stomping my animals into the fences, followed by animals being thrown, arguments with Mum about who started the fight, and tears – mostly from John.

The first concrete memory I have of John is one that highlighted our differences, and evoked emotions in me that surfaced later in our lives. On that day summer sun shone on a crowd gathered in front of a stage set up beside a line of leafy poplars on Hamilton Park, not far from our home in East Gore. I believe the events of the day were to celebrate the renaming of what had been called The East Gore Domain, to Hamilton Park. It would make the year 1957; I would have been eight and John soon to turn five.

A talent quest was underway, and I stood beside Dad and Gran and Pop Hicks, while the show took place. I had been told John was to make an appearance in the contest, and he and Mum had gone to get him ready for the performance. Contestants danced, sang, played the guitar and piano, and the crowd clapped and shouted support.

Eventually, after a long break between contestants, I saw the curtain beside the stage ripple with movement, and a little figure almost make it through, before retreating. The woman at the piano started playing, then stopped, and looked back at the curtain. A murmur, like wind rustling leaves, went through the crowd as I stretched to see what was happening. The piano played again, the curtains parted and out came John, pushed along by two arms that reached out from behind the curtains.

He stood in the middle of the stage, tiny and alone, wearing nothing but a grass skirt and an Hawaiian lei around his neck. The piano player stopped. A ripple of amusement lifted from the crowd, and the crackly sound of a record came through the speakers. John looked like he was about to run until a voice called to him from behind the curtain and he began to dance. His hips shook to the sound of Hawaiian guitars, and his arms and fingers, held to the audience, quivered to the music.

I looked up at Dad, worried about what he might be thinking, but he stared at the stage without expression. I was shocked at John’s bravery, but I was also red-faced with embarrassment. When the record finished and the dance stuttered to an end, some in the audience clapped, and many laughed. I slunk away, not wanting to be known as the brother of the little boy in the grass skirt, dancing.

By the time we were at high school our differences were obvious, although the words to describe what lay behind them didn’t come until we lived together in Dunedin. In the last years we lived in Gore, I fished for trout, played rugby, ran on the track, delivered newspapers, and worked after school with Pop Hicks at The Southland Farmers Coop, while John biked across town to practice ballet with the few brave enough to follow their dreams, irrespective of the consequences.

Our lives were upended by the death of our 41-year-old father in 1966. Mum took a part time job to help keep the family afloat, and in 1967 I left for university in Dunedin, while John also moved away, to Dunedin, then Wellington and Auckland. He lived an exuberant life in his new community, though always shadowed by his challenging early years, and the illegality of his sexuality.

John died in the spring of 1980 of an asthma attack while involved in the filming of The Race For The Yankee Zephyr. Filming of the movie stopped for three days after his death, and some of the cast, including the director, David Hemmings – who earlier starred in Antonioni’s movie, Blow Up, about a photographer – came to his funeral in Gore.

From my first memories of him, until he died, aged 27, I loved him, and admired his bravery in the face of his heroin addiction, and the drowning of the partner he loved. There were times when I confronted those who mocked him for being different, but there were times also when I acted like the boy in the park, who turned away from him in shame. I can forgive myself for these failures now, but they play a part in my desire to keep my memories of him alive, as I live my most fortunate life.