Raw Spirit

by Iain Banks

  Loch Lomond distillery is a bit of a shocker if you’re expecting a wee farm-like gem set amongst the heather with a breezy view over the sparkling loch. It’s a factory on an industrial estate. It used to be a calico dye works, so it too is a conversion job. They don’t do tours but next door there’s the Antartex Village shopping complex, a slightly rough-looking converted factory with garish red external walls and god-awful piped music of extreme Heederum-Hawderum-ness that’s patently been dredged from the very lowest, most crud-encrusted sump of the great festering bilge tank that is Scottish Cliché MacMusic from Bonnie Glen Grotesquo.

  This drivel even extends to the car park so there really is no escape. I have a walk round, watch some skins being prepared to make leather jackets, stop off at the café for a cup of tea and a scone, walk round some more, find the Whisky Shop – a good selection, and I buy quite a few bottles – and, as I pay, realise that although I’ve only been in here 30 minutes, I swear this is the second time I’ve had to suffer ‘Oh Ye Canny Shove Yer Granny Aff A Bus’. I ask the assistant how he stands this music all day. He just smiles and asks, What music?

  Loch Lomond – another so-called Highland distillery, though only by the skin of its aluminium cladding – is a bit of a multi-tasker; it’s set up so that it can produce quite different expressions according to which of its different stills are used. There’s Loch Lomond itself, plus Inchmurrin and Old Rhosdhu and, potentially, several others. There’s another distillery not far away on the banks of the Clyde near Erskine called Littlemill (correctly a Lowland) which is owned by the same company. This has just started production again after nearly ten years mothballed, and the same people own Glen Scotia in Campbeltown, so the Loch Lomond Distillery Company could end up with quite a selection.

  Loch Lomond Pure Malt (no age statement on the bottle I bought) is surprisingly seaweedy. It’s a light, leafy Lowlander like the Deanston, with some sweetness in there too, but it has a definite scent of the sea shore about it. Definitely different. I like it for its eccentricity.

  I’ve also picked up a bottle of Inverleven at the Whisky Shop in Antartex Village, a 16-year-old from ’86, and – after stopping to take a few photos of the long red façade of the old Argyll Motor Company factory, also in Alexandria – Inverleven distillery is the next stop.

  Bit high rise for a distillery, but all the more dramatic for that, with soaring red-brick walls rising almost from the middle of Dumbarton, wide-stanced but with strong verticals from chimneys, pipes and tall, narrow windows. It has a nicely asymmetric and yet balanced look about it, and the way the set-back of it works, outer components leading in towards higher, narrower units, reminds me of a castle. It’s actually in quite a pleasant situation, too, close by one small tree-filled park and across the river Leven from another, at the point where the Leven debouches into the Clyde in the shadow of Dumbarton Rock and its uneven straggle of twin-set fortifications.

  The 16-year-old Inverleven is not quite so well built or dramatic as the place it’s made, but a very approachable dram all the same; distinctively fruity with some smoke and peat, and dry and smooth at the same time. Chocolate Orange, was what I thought.

  Last stop is Auchentoshan, just east of Old Kilpatrick, barely a mortar round’s lob from Jim and Joan’s place in Dalmuir and spitting distance from what’s left of this end of the Antonine Wall. I really must get one of those clip-on GPS units for my PDA. I spend a very frustrating half-hour or so trying to get to the distillery, going down one road that looks like it heads straight there only to find that it doesn’t, trying another that also looks promising but then loops round without even going close and then another one again, still without success. What makes it especially annoying is that for most of the time I can see the damn distillery, sitting there in watery sunlight looking quite smug in a trim sort of way. The only plus during all this tortuous maze-running is finding an interesting but deteriorating thirties art-deco style sports pavilion across some playing fields north of the rail line.

  I finally work out that the way to get to Auchentoshan is not through any of the housing estates that surround it on three sides, but from the north via the main Glasgow–Dumbarton dual carriageway, just east of the Erskine Bridge approach road complex; there’s a single wire-fenced approach road leading off the westerly carriageway straight down to the buildings by the side of the dam that holds the cooling water. Wrong maps, again.

  So, Auchentoshan. It’s an unusual whisky because it’s triple distilled, rather than double. Auchentoshan’s the last surviving fully triple-distilled Scotch, representing a style that used to be much more common. Partly this reflects improvements in distilling technology. Distilling is about reduction, about refining. Stills don’t make alcohol – the mixture of hot water, yeast and the sugars in the barley accomplish that. A still is just a way of separating that already existing alcohol from all the rest of the stuff that’s been left behind after the fermentation process has ended. In the old days a lot of places needed to go through the boiling-cooling process three times; now – with better control over every part of the process and fine-tuning the extent of the middle cut that’s taken – twice is generally all that’s required.

  The result of triple distilling, other influences being equal, is to produce a light, delicate, usually quite floral and perfumy whisky. This probably suits a Lowland style of whisky better than an Islay South Coaster, say, though it would be interesting to experiment (I think there should be a big experimental distilling rig in a Scottish university where they can use all sorts of different types of heating, varying shapes of still, adjustable-length and adjustable-angle Lyne arms and so on … you might not find much that’s actually applicable to real-world distilleries, but it would be interesting!). As a finished whisky, Auchentoshan depends more than most on its casking, and the star of the readily available expressions is the Three Wood (no age given), which moves promiscuously from bourbon casks to oloroso barrels before ending up in the embrace of Pedro Ximenez. The result of all this serial experience is a seductive, full-bodied, rather fruity … well, let’s not get too tabloid here, but this is generally agreed to be a fine dram, though when I do taste the Three Wood I find it a bit oily for my taste (my three fellow tasters agree, so it’s not just me). It’s almost as though one of the barrels which went into the marrying process had held diesel or something. It’s another whisky which apparently ages particularly well, with 21-, 22 (22?)- 25- and 31-year-old bottlings amongst others, all of which sound – I confess I haven’t tasted them – well worth the finding. Providing they don’t taste like the bottle I bought. By all accounts, though, another very different and very pliable, very adaptive whisky.

  There’s a Banks Trap in Broomhill; a small but well-formed retail park which cunningly contains a really big outdoor shop right next to a really big Oddbins branch. The outdoor shop is so big it has displays of assembled tents lying around and full-size canoes hanging from the roof and the Oddbins is so big it has a walk-in beer cooler and a separate and very sizable Fine Wine section, not to mention a giant walk-in cigar humidor. It’s almost like somebody’s been taking notes of my weaknesses. It only needs a Porsche dealership next door in one direction and a decent Indian restaurant in the other and you’d never prise me out of there. Though a sizable bookshop would probably be required too. And maybe a motorbike showroom. Oh, and a CD/DVD store. And a chandlers. And an electronics and gadgets shop.

  Anyway, stuff is bought. The Defender swallows boxes and cases containing different types of Guaranteed Fun. Finally it’s time to head for Bruce and Yvonne’s.

  We’re getting a chaps’ night out. We take a taxi to the Ben Nevis bar on Sauchiehall Street for a couple of beers, then stroll round to Mother India for a superb meal that’s interestingly different from the usual sub-continental run of dishes (much as I love them all). The variety of really tasty fish dishes is especially impressive.

  Greenock. Cappielow, hallowed ground of the mighty Greenock Morton Football Club. We
get there in far too much time because on the last occasion we tried to get in to a really important match, a decade ago when Morton had a slimmish chance of ascending into the Scottish Premier League (and, oh, how long ago that seems now), we didn’t get in. We were there an hour ahead of time but there were just so many people queuing already that the ground was full before we got anywhere near the turnstiles.

  This time we’re there an hour and half ahead of kick-off time and have no problem. We meet up with Jim and Dave and our friends Ronnie and Nipper. Jim informs us he has stopped smoking. I think this is what convinces me that miracles really do happen and Morton are definitely going up. Actually I’d have thought a comparative miracle to Jim stopping smoking would be Morton winning the European Cup, but sure enough, even during an often tense football game, Jim does not light up.

  It’s a long wait before the game (it’s a really long wait, because the ground is heading for maximum capacity again and the kick-off’s delayed by quarter of an hour to let as many as possible in) and my feet are sore because this morning we walked from Bruce and Yvonne’s just off Crow Road to Byres Road and back, to shop at Fopp and have a look round an antiques fair. This end of Cappielow, overlooking Sinclair Street, still has terracing rather than seats and so I lean on the blue, drainpipe-wide rail and take the weight off my feet that way.

  However it’s good to have the time to talk to people, the weather stays fine and when the game does eventually start it’s all okay, because Morton play well, they score a goal, keep a clean sheet and so go up as champions. It’s not a great game except in its consequences, but it’s not a poor game either; Morton deserve to win and there are no especially dubious refereeing decisions or particular reasons for Peterhead to feel aggrieved; they was not robbed.

  Agreed, there is a slight stramash on the touchline when tempers run a little high towards the conclusion of the 90 minutes and it looks like a few fists are thrown, albeit ineffectually, possibly some of them belonging to coaching staff, but even this is quickly sorted out and doesn’t unduly disturb the flow of the game.

  Fitba and the Greater Morality.

  One of the things I dislike about football is its potential for deeply unfair results (this, as you might imagine, is a well developed and deeply felt theme amongst Morton supporters). Because games are so often decided by a single goal and so much depends not just on the imperfect skills of the competing teams but also on the imperfect skills of the refereeing team, it’s all too common to see a result against the run of play. I suppose it all comes down to the clunkily digital, almost binary nature of the scoring system.

  The tallying system in a game like rugby, for example, with its multitudinous points, makes unfair results less likely. There are still refereeing mistakes and instances of unfairness, and you still see the occasional iffy result gained more on luck than on skills prevailing on the day, but the mistakes tend not to have quite such a potentially crucial effect on the game, and manifestly contrary results are fewer.

  And I do think they should have a fourth referee watching replays on TV, wherever possible. Some disagree, taking a purist line on this, saying that by not using this technology the spirit of the game is preserved; it means that everybody is playing under the same rules, throughout the world and at every level, whether it’s a season-end Sunday League match after all the consequential stuff has been decided or the final of the World Cup.

  Yes, but. The whole point is that the result of one match matters to a few tens or hundreds of people while the other matters to hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions, and the vast numbers of people sitting at home watching a replay showing a piece of blatant fouling that’s gone unpunished, or an innocent action that was falsely awarded a card, can plainly see that an injustice has been committed (you could ban TV companies showing replays, but people would just use their video recorders). If you can use technology to prevent that, when it is so cumulatively important, then you should.

  People hate injustice; a very large part of what society is all about – what civilisation is all about – is protecting the innocent, letting people just get on with their lives and their livelihoods, and either deterring people from doing bad things to others, or punishing them if they do. When we see a perfectly good, legal tackle in the penalty box which the tackled player responds to by taking a dive, getting the defender sent off and gaining a penalty, and it’s all shown in forensic, repeatable detail in front of us (and especially if this decides the match), the sense of outrage we feel is about a lot more than football.

  Compromising the purity of the game’s spirit is a small price to pay, and besides, as soon as the concept of the professional foul was introduced, the moment footballers began to be traded for money, the instant that the first club became a quotable commodity on a stock exchange, the essential purity of the game, its rules and spirit were already just a long gurgling noise issuing from somewhere deep down the pan.

  We discuss waiting for the Third Division trophy to arrive – apparently there’s been a helicopter on standby waiting to take the cup to wherever it was needed – but then the rain starts (not that the Morton players notice – they’re already soaked with champagne) and so we leave.

  Tired but happy, and in sore need of a celebratory drink.

  Another Glenfinnan trip, another couple of distilleries. I’m alone in the M5 this weekend, heading up the A9 to Pitlochry before continuing on to Les and Aileen’s with a boot full of what you might call Found Fireworks or Opportunist Pyrotechnics.

  I have a weakness for explosions. Over the years this has manifested itself in many different ways, and on a couple of occasions has solidified, as it were, into two groups of letters: BAM and FLEE.

  BAM stood for Banks And MacLennan, but it was the obvious schoolboy onomatopoeia that was important (entirely appropriately, as my pal Andy MacLennan and I were both schoolboys when we came up with the name). FLEE stands for Fife-Lochaber Explosive Entertainments (Ltd.) and is a more sober and serious enterprise altogether in as much that it’s a properly registered company with Companies House (Company number SC2 13224, if you really want to know).

  Now, obviously, if I’d ever been in a war, under fire, had anybody close to me die in an explosion or lived in Northern Ireland during the seventies and eighties, I probably wouldn’t find explosions or explosives quite so entertaining. However, I’ve been lucky enough to live a quiet and sheltered life and, to me, explosives have always basically been of a recreational nature.

  I’m tempted to blame Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds. There were a lot of explosions in Thunderbirds. I loved the fact that after the initial titles, while you were being informed that the series was filmed in Videcolor and Supermarionation (whatever the hell these were supposed to mean), there was an establishing shot of some huge desert installation; a refinery or a power station or something which the camera lingered on after the lettering faded … and then it just blew up! In a series of huge, totally gratuitous, completely plot-independent explosions! I was at an impressionable age at the time when I first saw this and remember thinking, Wow! Brilliant!

  Except I’d be lying, because me staring enraptured at the perfectly gratuitous screen-borne exploso-fest was just an example of one already long-confirmed explosion freak acknowledging the spoor of another. Long before my first exposure to Thunderbirds I’d discovered I loved drawing explosions, throwing stones into the sea because splashes were basically water-borne explosions and even chucking dried clods of earth across my dad’s vegetable garden because when the clods hit they flew apart as though exploding, and the dust looked like smoke. And I always really liked fireworks.

  In the sixties they’d practically sell you fireworks while you were still in your pram, and the bangers were more powerful (no, really, they were). Good grief, back then you could buy Jumping Jacks. Jumping Jacks were fireworks designed to explode serially – and unpredictably – and jump around in random directions with each detonation. Can you imagine that? If you wo
rk in Health and Safety you’re probably about to faint (if you’re Chinese or from certain parts of southern Europe, you’re probably thinking, Yeah, so?).

  So we had fun with fireworks.

  On the other hand, of course, I was just one of the many lucky ones and lots of kids blinded themselves – or others – lost fingers and/or were badly burned or scarred for life. I wouldn’t even suggest repealing any legislation that restricts the sale of fireworks to minors.

  At Gourock High I became friends with Andy MacLennan. We’d meet up and muck about with carbide and water mixtures, then with pressurised petrol containers and finally with a compound of sodium chlorate and sugar, in all cases producing explosions.

  The power went up as we went along. The carbide and water stuff usually resulted in fairly gentle detonations like large pops; we rarely had to move out of the MacLennans’ back porch, which is where we used to perform these experiments. The pressurised petrol paraphernalia made a noise like a jet engine towards the end and then banged fairly loudly and created a mushroom cloud several metres across and ten metres or more high and was quite spectacular in the context of my mum and dad’s carefully tended back garden.

  And the sodium chlorate and sugar stuff produced supremely-fatal-if-you-were-too-close, military-standard supersonic-shrapnel-type, serious fuck-off explosions. We had to head into the hills above Inverkip to let those off in peace, though we did try to blow up a donated model yacht in front of a hundred other Greenock High pupils one lunch time, in an old reservoir almost entirely surrounded by overlooking houses. That particular display didn’t work (water ingress resulting in fuse extinguishment) but we had others that did, up in the hills near the Daff Reservoir.