by Iain Banks
The display stuff at Strathspey Cooperage is interesting, too; I hadn’t realised that the oak (Quercus alba from the US, making up 97 per cent of the barrels used in Scotland, as opposed to the remaining three per cent of Quercus robur from Spain) that goes to make casks has to grow for between 100 and a 150 years before it can be harvested, or that when the bourbon barrels shipped in from the States are reassembled, they’re bigger; it takes five US barrels to make four hogsheads each with a capacity of 56 imperial gallons. Hence a lot of the bashing and banging, I suppose.
And it’s a legal requirement in the US that bourbon barrels are only used once, not just some purist whim or tradition. I immediately start to formulate a mild conspiracy theory to account for this perversity. I mean, if Scotch benefits from being kept in old bourbon casks, why shouldn’t bourbon itself? Why not at least experiment with second- and third-fill bourbon? Treating these labour-intensive barrels as effectively disposable seems just plain wasteful. I bet a smidgen of research would reveal that it’s all a bit of, semi-appropriately, pork-barrel politics; this law will have been passed because some timber magnate had entire forests of oak to shift and got the law passed to help make this happen.
I’m wrong. It later turns out that it’s a rare, if dubious, instance of a victory for American organised labour; the US unions sponsored the law so that there would be more employment for their coopers. I find this quite heartening, though what real difference it makes that the Scotch industry has benefited from a depending-how-you-look-at-it slightly daft law promoted by some probably not terribly left-wing US unions rather than some megalomaniac forestry owner or seedy cartel of timber conglomerates is debatable.
Craigellachie the town is home to the Craigellachie Hotel (well, if you’re going to have a Craigellachie Hotel, that would seem the logical place to put it), whose Quaich Bar offers 500 different malts. A couple of execs from the Japanese Hankyu department store who visited the hotel thought the bar was so impressive they had an exact copy constructed in Tokyo for the November 2002 British Fair. They even had one of the bartenders flown out to staff it. So there you are; Scottish bars travel well too.
The fine weather continues. Speyside looks wonderful, and the distant glimpses of the snow still hugging the peaks of the Cairngorms just adds to the beauty of this warm, early spring. The three of us enjoy using the M5 on these Moray roads. The A95, when it opens again, is a good, open, quite fast if moderately busy highway, and the surrounding smaller roads are quieter, twistier and rollingly scenic, diving and looping through forests and small towns, past fields dotted with dozens of tiny lambs.
It occurs to me that maybe when it comes to roads I’m too much of a mountain snob, a remoteness junkie. I suppose I associate the best, most rewarding driving with a degree of verticality, or surrounding emptiness. I kind of dismiss the A9 because it’s so busy and relatively boring – and frustrating, with its heavy traffic and still limited bits of dual carriageway forever collapsing back to two-way – and I rarely drive it these days except where I have no choice.
When heading from Fife to Glenfinnan I have a sort of parallel route that avoids the A9 all the way up to Glen Garry, where there is a good long bit of dual carriageway; this alternative route takes a good half-hour longer than using the A9 the whole way, but it’s just so much more interesting to drive. Then, every now and again, when I do take the main road – usually because Ann wants to snooze, and can’t do that on the twisty roads – I notice the scenery around the A9, maybe just because there’s a particularly flattering light, or because there’s some moody-looking mist wrapping the forests and hills, or because it’s time for the seasonal drama of autumn leaf colours, and I realise that actually it goes through some very impressive landscapes, that if I lived in Holland or East Anglia or even London or the Midlands, I’d regard this scenery as something close to breathtaking. I’ve just got too used to it, too accustomed to regarding the A9 as an honorary motorway; a conveyor belt that takes you to where the interesting roads and the real driving begins, but pretty much without merit on its own.
Well, I’m spoiled. I know this. My commute consists of walking downstairs of a morning and aside from shopping trips almost all of the driving I do is for fun, because I enjoy it. I love pootling round the local roads of Fife and beyond on my motorbike, but my greatest loves are the Highland roads, and, as a rule, I tend to feel that the further west and north you go the better the roads get, even allowing for the single-track bits.
The drive from Glenfinnan up to Dornie, near Kyle of Lochalsh, where we used to have friends (and a share in a pub – another long story we’ll come to later), was and is one of my favourite routes, especially beyond Invergarry. I’d better point out that this Invergarry lies in a Glen Garry that is no relation to the Glen Garry mentioned earlier – Scotland is full of places with the same name that are nowhere near each other.
Scotland: land of contrasts (not).
Scotland is not really that big, but it is quite rugged, especially in the west, where sheer geological happenstance and millions of years of exposure to the Atlantic waves have combined to produce a coastline of extreme tatteredness. This historically made travel – except by sea and loch, as already mentioned – quite difficult. You can imagine that people didn’t get out of their own glen very much. And that is the only excuse I can think of for the repetition of Scottish place names, if we aren’t to accept that it isn’t all down to basic Caledonian laziness and lack of imagination.
I’ve just looked up a gazetteer of Scotland and the third and fourth entries in the main section are two mountains rejoicing in the name of A’Bhuidheanach. These are not even very far away from each other! (The fifth entry is A’Bhuidheanach Bheag; guess what? Also a mountain.)
Off the top of my head I can think of two Comries, twin Kincardines, a brace of Crathies, a pair of Clovas, a number of Niggs, more Clachans than you can shake a claymore at and five or six Tarbets/Tarberts in Argyll alone. A lot of the time it’s because these are simple descriptive names; Clachan means stone house (whoa – imagine the standard of living that made that worth pointing out), while Tarbet/Tarbert means portage point; a place where by dragging your boats across a narrow neck of land you could save yourself some sailing time or avoid rough waters. Argyll, through its basic geography – it has more coastline than France, for Pete’s sake – is littered with such sites and therefore names.
But all the same.
Anyway, they had to put in a new road between Loch Garry and Glen Moriston back in the fifties when the push to produce lots more hydroelectric power meant more or less doubling the size of Loch Garry, Loch Loyne and Loch Cluanie, drowning the roads which had grown on the old droving routes. The result was one of the best driving roads in Scotland; a glorious, sweeping, swooping ribbon of tarmac with no built-up areas between Invergarry and Shiel Bridge, save for a vanishingly brief exception at the Cluanie Inn itself.
Beyond, into Wester Ross, lies glorious, mountainous, eye-poppingly spectacular scenery and (amongst the sorry nonsense of single-track, so-called A-roads, which any other European country would surely have consigned to historic editions of atlases decades ago) roads of such beauty and grandeur it gladdens the heart just looking at them on the map. Well, if you’re a cartophiliac petrol-head like me they have that effect.
Just a shame there are no distilleries up in this whole rugged reach of Scotland, or on any of the Outer Hebrides. None that we know about, anyway.
So have I, over the years – my head well and truly turned by all this spellbinding semi-wilderness and tempestuous vertiginousness – been too quick to dismiss the more refined, gentle attractions of places like Speyside? Maybe so. All the same, I’ve always had a soft spot for the Borders and for Dumfries and Galloway, both as places of great, if – compared to the Highlands – rather restrained, rolling, rounded-off beauty and as the homes of some brilliant, often quite empty roads. Speyside feels similar in a lot of ways; busier than Dumfries and Galloway, certainl
y, but with a similar mix of forests and hills.
Maybe I’m just getting older. Before too long I’ll be one of those wee old guys who wears a bunnet in the car; I’ll drive with my nose up against the steering wheel while staring at the road from underneath the rim, ambling along in a big fast car I never really use while looking out for a lay-by with a view of the water so we can get out the camping-chairs and me and the missus can have a nice cup of tea. Goodness knows there are zillions of worse fates, but the prospect still fills me with a mild horror. A love of wild scenery, even if it’s just to drive through rather than walk in, might stave off senility for a year or two. This is what I tell myself, anyway.
Glengoyne is technically a Highland whisky, at least given the place where it’s made, if not necessarily where all of it’s matured, though this is anyway one of those occasions when you find yourself puzzling over where the Highland Line does, and ought to run.
The Highlands: their identification and use.
The Highlands are a bit like science fiction; you generally know with some certainty when you’re in the relevant area, but as soon as you start trying to define it you end up getting into all sorts of messes. There are places where I feel I can pin the start of the Highlands down to a matter of a few yards, like when taking the road north out of Gilmerton, near Crieff, where the country suddenly changes as you pull away from underneath the trees, opening out as the road rises towards the heathered hills like something uncoiling after a long confinement.
On the other hand, there are whole areas of Scotland where the Highlands seem to sort of fade in. That entire corner between Aberdeen and Inverness; I have no real idea where that fertile, well-cultivated, gently buxom farm land ends and the Highlands start. Plus I have my doubts about the Flow Country, and a lot of that south-east-facing coast between Inverness and Wick. Sometimes it feels like we should scrap the idea of the Highlands altogether, but that only ever seems to make sense in moments of frustration at deciding what is and isn’t part of the region in the first place.
I suppose to some extent the definition of the Highlands has anyway changed over the years, moving north from places as far south as Stirling as land was improved and fields spread, the clan system withered and – probably most to the point – as the Gaelic language retreated.
Glengoyne isn’t the closest distillery to Glasgow – that would be Auchentoshan – but it is easily accessible from the city, it has a pleasant setting at the southern foot of the Campsie Fells and it does welcome visitors. We pull up on another warm day, brave the main road that divides the car park and most of the warehouses from the distillery proper and walk up the little glen at the back of the distillery by the cooling pond where there’s a dinky little Visitor Centre and shop, where I buy a bottle of the 17-year-old. We’re kind of toured out and so avoid the formal guided thing, though I take a photograph of the stills from the courtyard outside.
The whisky itself, at least in the 17-year-old edition, is big and fruity, unpeated, quite fresh, and sweetly oaked. It’s matured in a different type of sherry cask from most whiskies; palo cortado (I’m quite a fan of sherries – well, dry sherries – but I confess this is one I hadn’t heard of). The palo cortado probably has a lot to do with its orangey colour and citrus flavour. So, another healthily flowering branch on the great burgeoning tree of Different Whiskies; the more I taste all these novel expressions the more I get the sense that single-malt whisky is developing in a deeply interesting way, pulling in and making convincing use of barrels which have contained all sorts of different kinds of drinks.
The Ferry. We overnight at our house and the four of us head for the Omar Khayyam. This is a lazy choice, in a way; Edinburgh is full of deeply wonderful restaurants, but Ann and I have settled into a routine that involves – if we’re looking to lunch – going to Viva Mexico, on Cockburn Street, near Waverley station, or – for dinner – the OK, diagonally across from Haymarket station. It’s all because we live so close to the railway at our end and both restaurants are an easy walk/waddle from the relevant station at the other.
It wouldn’t be quite so bad if I varied my choice, but I don’t even open the menu in the OK; the guys don’t need an order book, just a photocopy: two dry sherries, a bottle of the Sunnycliff (a very full-flavoured, vintage-consistent and good value Australian red), Monkfish starter, Chicken Jaipuri (hot) and a Tarka Daal side dish … Ann at least varies her order a bit, but mine is practically set in stone. I keep meaning to try some of the other stuff on the menu again – years ago I was positively promiscuous here, before I decided I’d fallen in love with Chicken Jaipuri (hot) – but then I discovered – after tasting an example which one of my brothers-in-law had ordered – that my second favourite dish after Chicken Jaipuri (hot) is Chicken Jaipuri (mild). Bit of a mixture of emotions, there; happiness mingled with a sort of disappointment. Still, somehow I cope.
Well, ya-bloody-hoo. One good thing, one decent image to come out of the war; the sight of Saddam’s statue being toppled. But even this is poorly done, messy and staged and unauthentic and incomplete. The pictures show the awful bloody thing starting to tilt, then they cut and when we see it next they have beefier chains on it and it’s a US vehicle doing the pulling, not the locals. The statue falls, but does not detach from its plinth, two big metal reinforcing poles inside anchoring it to the concrete. A US flag is put on top before somebody realises this might give out the wrong – for which read accurate – message, and an Iraqi flag is found instead.
There ya go; we support the bastard when it suits us, we arm him to start a war against them there fundamentalists in Iran, sell him chemicals to gas the Kurds in their homes, we even let the son-of-a-bitch missile one of our own ships without getting too upset about it, then we give him a good slap for invading another country – that is, after all, our job – incite people to rise against him, get scared in case those durned Iranians might come out winners from that uprising, leave the uprisers hung out to dry and whistle Dixie while they’re slaughtered, impose a decade’s worth of sanctions that if nothing else make sure there’ll be half a million fewer little towel-heads in the world then decide it’s time to avenge daddy, secure the world’s second biggest oil reserves and show the world who’s boss. And all for the good of the Iraqi people. Jesus H. Christ, when will these people do something for themselves for a change?
Oh, and still no WMDs, used, deployed, anywhere near being deployed or even found stored in some dusty desert bunker.
Another sparklingly beautiful day, the sunlight dancing on the waters of the river Forth and flaring across the vast red pipes of the bridge, the sky pure blue. I shake my head as we pack the car’s boot. ‘This is like living in southern California. The good weather’s getting almost boring.’
Aileen passes by, toting bags and laughing. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Is this a piece of your brain?’ Les asks.
Les and Aileen are sun worshippers; the ideal year for them consists of three holidays in somewhere very hot indeed – the Canaries, Portugal, Greece, Egypt – with a very hot (for Scotland) Glenfinnan summer thrown in. The way their holidays work they can just about manage this. We’ve been on holiday abroad with them a few times but I’m usually far too hot – red-faced, lathered in sweat, coated in sunblock with the sun protection factor of kitchen foil and wearing a broad-brimmed hat even when I’m in the swimming pool. Meanwhile the McFarlanes are just about comfortable.
It’s not my fault; I’m a cold climate person. Anything much above sixteen centigrade and I think I’m in a heatwave. Weather that has everybody else shivering, blowing into their fists, stamping their feet and pulling on extra layers of clothing will see me, in a T shirt or shirt-sleeved, clapping my hands and declaring the temperature ‘just nice’. Les, on the other hand, ideally likes to have worked up a berry-brown suntan before he even leaves for his hols and has, as I can attest, been mistaken for a Greek guy. In Greece. By Greek people. This does not normally happen to Greenock-born Caucasian ch
aps who live in Lochaber.
We head north again, passing Brechin. This is where Glencadam used to be made, beside Brechin City’s football ground. The 15-year-old I have is quite fresh and tastes a bit like full-cream milk poured over strawberries; interesting but not that inspiring. At Montrose we end up by the seaside, by a funny little water park on the esplanade. I am convinced I see a soliton.
The water park is part of a larger fun-and-games area with slides and climbing frames and so on, but you can find that sort of stuff anywhere; what fascinates me is this set of broad, gently sloped, interconnecting concrete channels, with little taps, gates and controllable fountains. To a long-time incorrigible dam builder like me this is something like heaven, albeit a sort of restricted one. There are about a dozen kids splashing around in it, shoving the little dam-gates this way and that, turning taps on and off or ferrying water from one channel to another by bucket, and a couple of young boys – maybe eight or nine years old – who are throwing themselves into the shallow pools and dancing over the fountains spraying water at each other, getting utterly soaked. This looks, the four of us agree, cold. It’s sunny, but there’s a breeze coming off the North Sea and even I’m glad I put my jacket on before we got out of the car. What a great place though; like having a dam/channel system you’d have to work for days to create, all set up in concrete with water on tap. Whoever designed this was a genius, I tell myself, then I see the soliton and just whoop for joy, because I’ve never seen one before.
A soliton is a single wave that propagates along a channel over long distances, losing very little energy. It’s all to do with the width and depth of the channel and the wavelength and height of the wave itself; if these figures are all in a certain proportion to each other a kind of harmony is established that sets up a soliton, and it’ll just sweep calmly along a channel for a long, long time. They were first noticed in Dutch canals, where they could keep going for kilometres. This miniature example (assuming that’s what this is and I’m not deceiving myself) eventually hits the shallows at the far end of one of the little concrete channels after ten metres or so, but while it lasts it’s beautiful.
