by Iain Banks
We’d invite a bunch of friends and head up into Forestry Commission land in a convoy of cars, and then one of us would keep people entertained with some small explosions – the equivalent of quickly prepared and presented starters – while the other one got on with the preparation of the main course, our feature presentation.
We blew a lot of shit up.
Actually when we got to the sodium chlorate and sugar stage, we had problems creating anything other than explosions. We kept on trying to make guns, but they always blew up. We tried making rockets. They blew up too. Easy-refill burners for the first generation of bombs; exploded. Rocket-propelled cars; guess what? (Actually the rocket-propelled cars worked fine.)
It has to be said that continually trying to make a gun with a wooden breech block was possibly being a little naïve – I’m sure our Physics, Woodwork and Metalwork teachers would have been appalled.
On the other hand the rogue exploding burner taught us we didn’t need burners in the first place. That was Andy’s Close Shave; the very suddenly – and indeed very highly – airborne burner, constructed largely from a half-kilo of lead, came inches away from taking MacLennan’s head off. I had a couple of near things myself, though apart from giving ourselves ringing ears and bright spots before the eyes now and again neither of us harmed so much as an eyelash.
BAM eventually graduated to electrical detonation of the sodium chlorate and sugar bombs and we tried our hand at making gunpowder (technically possible, but overly complicated) before disbanding BAM for good when we went to our respective universities. This was probably just as well in 1972 as the IRA of the time were doing their damnedest to take all the fun out of explosions.
A few years ago, struck by an excess of nostalgia, I bought some sodium chlorate weed killer for the first time in 30 years, but – rather unsportingly, I thought – the manufacturers are obliged to add a flame retardant to the stuff these days, and it just doesn’t work as an explosive component any more.
FLEE is a rather more above-board concern. FLEE has headed note paper, a bank account and its own cheque book. We even have corporate pens, key rings and coffee mugs, for goodness’ sake. Les is Company President, I’m Managing Director and Chairman, Aileen is Finance Director and Ann is Company Secretary. There’s a place on the board waiting for Eilidh as Creative Director once she’s legally old enough to fill such a post, at eighteen.
The whole idea was to get our hands on some serious fireworks again after they were banned from sale to the general public and restricted to professionals. We’d fondly imagined that just having a proper company would be enough to be accepted as pros, but it isn’t. We still can’t buy bigger fireworks than anybody else. Still, the key rings are cool.
It’s all because Glenfinnan has its own fireworks display on November the fifth. Glenfinnan is just a wee village and the Community Council can’t afford to set aside very much each year for a fireworks display, but it’s fun all the same. A good decade or so ago I managed to inveigle my way onto the pyrotechnics team (Pyrotechnician, we’ve decided, sounds so much more professional than Nutter Running Round Letting Off Fireworks In The Dark) so I get to help let the fireworks off.
Sitting round the bonfire a few years ago, lamenting the fact we used to be able to buy even bigger fireworks, we came up with the idea of FLEE. It was going to be called BIFF originally, but that had already been taken. Anyway, in retrospect, Companies House might have baulked at Big Impressive Fuck-off Fireworks.
There’s even a link between whisky and pyrotechnics, my chum Gary Lloyd has discovered. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they used to test the proof of the spirit by mixing it with gunpowder and setting light to it! Seriously. If the soggy mixture blew up it was too strong, if it went out it was too weak and if it burned steadily it was about right. How blinkin cool is that? Very rough and ready, in the sense of being wildly inaccurate, but still. Almost a shame they came up with more precise ways to measure the proof strength. Though I’m sure that if this remained the way they tested the stuff in the distilleries nowadays they still wouldn’t let you take flash photos of the process. You know; just in case.
This weekend is not about that, though. This weekend is about me attempting to resurrect the past and produce some blevies for the boys, some vapour explosions like the BAM mushroom clouds of old. It’s stuff for this nonsense the M5’s boot is full of. Technically I should probably have one of those orange HazChem stickers on the boot. That would look so cool. But I bet the bureaucracy’s a nightmare.
(As it turns out I never do get to let this lot off because the weather’s against us and the midges are out.)
First stop is Blair Athol distillery. In Pitlochry. Blair Atholl is a completely different town six miles away. The distillery which bears (most of) its name isn’t even on the right side of Pitlochry to be accidentally associated with it; it’s on the south side. This wouldn’t even be the Blair Atholl Road in the old days, it would have been the Perth Road or the Dunkeld Road. Exactly why this distillery situated quite firmly in Pitlochry is called Blair Athol (somewhat bizarrely missing out the second ‘I’ that the town takes) seems to be a bit of a mystery. Oh well.
They’re in the throes of commissioning a newly refurbished Visitor Centre and shop when I arrive on a rainy Friday in late May. The staff seem jolly despite the degree of mild chaos that attends this and it’s here the lady recommends Caol Ila as a good malt with a cigar. The Visitor Centre is in the modern style, with lots of blonde wood and exposed metal. Visitor Centre Vernacular is changing slowly with the times; there are more frosted glass panels around than polished dark wood ones, and sleekly tapering steel posts joined by tensioned wire ropes are replacing turned wood banisters and rails.
The distillery itself presents some visual treats, including a just-this-side-of-kitsch little courtyard dripping with ivy, cozily proportioned buildings and trees turned black with the same fungus that coats the warehouse walls both here and elsewhere. We’re told the trees aren’t harmed by the fungus. My arboreal distress diagnostic skills are no better than those of any other Joe M. Bloggs, but a close inspection of trees with the black stuff on their limbs and comparison with those that don’t would seem to bear out the assertion the trees are quite happy with their spirit-fed camouflage.
At Blair Athol, as well as some of the place’s own whisky, I buy a few bottles from other Diageo distilleries I’ve been to and photographed without having done tours of or made purchases at. I suppose proper whisky writers would call up the distillery or head office and arrange a private tour of these not-normally-open-to-the-public places, but generally I’m trying to do this in a punter stylee – albeit a punter with deep pockets – and so I’m denying myself such privileges.
Besides, some of the people in the distilleries might have read my books and, when I make my request for a private tour, be inclined to say, No! Now, if you were that Irvine Welsh or Ian Rankin …
Blair Athol is an extremely fruity dram, full of ginger, peach and dried fruits. It’s not overly sweet, certainly not cloying and arguably quite dry, but the fruit does kind of leap out at you. I remember trying a Blair Athol some long time ago and being very unimpressed, but whatever was wrong then is all right now. I stagger back to the car with my case of clinking, clanking bottles and head out of town up a wee wet twisty road to Edradour, Scotland’s smallest distillery, nestling in the folded hills above Pitlochry.
Edradour is a little gem of a place, a sort of distillery in miniature you want to wrap up and put under the Christmas tree. It looks just like an old farm because that’s exactly what it once was. The place is all white with red detailing, the buildings clustered around the rushing Edradour Burn that provides the water for cooling – another stream, the Moulin Burn, provides the water for production. When I arrive, in the middle of another heavy shower, two guys are standing stripped to the waist in the tiny mash tun, shovelling still steaming draff out through a waist-high window and onto the trailer of a tr
actor parked outside.
The pale copper stills are tiny, at the legal limit for size. Any smaller and the Excise people would deem them compact enough to be both portable and too easy to hide, hence illegal. It’s all so compact. It’s like finding a distillery that fits into a double garage. There are only three people working in the distillery itself – there are twice as many in the shop and on the tour side of the operation. The tour and tasting are free, too, which seems particularly decent in such a small operation.
Edradour has a thing called a Morton (huzzah!) Refrigerator, the last still in use, certainly in the whisky industry. I’d read about this device and been looking forward to seeing this (which, now I think about it, makes me a bit sad, but there you are). A Morton Cooler-Downer might be a more satisfactory name for what it is. It’s a long, low, open red-painted thing with lots of rivets, like a wide, shallow tin bath, full of sets of vanes or baffles stretching across it. Looks like the water goes up over one baffle then down under the next, up over the following one, and so on. Oh well, not as dramatic as I’d been hoping for, but interesting enough. Used on farms to cool milk. So there.
The distillery has outdoor worm tubs, pipes gurgling and pool waters steaming as the latest shower patters the surface. In the Visitor Centre, built in an old malt barn, there’s a good, informative little video, displays of old distillery implements and a guide to answer questions (my guide is Elaine. When I mention I’m writing a book, she tells me the new owner, the chap behind the Signatory brand of special bottlings, is on the premises. She asks if I’d like to meet him. My natural shyness, which does surface occasionally, makes me say no).
Back in the shop I buy a bottle of the cask strength 14-year-old in a very attractive bottle that looks a little like a wider-necked Absolut bottle. This is another bottle that doesn’t last long once Ann, Dad and I get stuck into it; rich and powerful, smooth and creamy. Macallan-like, in fact, which is very high praise.
There is something intimate about the act of drinking Edradour once you’ve seen the place. It’s an easy distillery to feel close to; small enough, you feel, to embrace. The whisky is big and powerful, but even so you still find yourself thinking about those dinky little stills, the mash tun the size of a kids’ paddling pool, the croft-like feel of the whole set-up. Of all the distilleries I’ve been to so far, it’s the one most likely to bring a happy smile to my face when I think about it. Must get another bottle.
13: Just the Whole Gantry, Then
HERE’S A HANDY tip: when a cocktail recipe begins with the words, Take A Pint Glass … beware.
My friend Roger invented the Blue Moon in a bar in Sheffield when the owner foolishly invited him to order any cocktail he liked, on the house. You fill the glass half full of ice cubes, then introduce measures of: vodka, gin, white rum, tequila, Cointreau, Pernod and blue curaçao. Add a dash of lime juice and top up with lemonade. My variation is to top up with soda water to produce a less sweet-tasting drink. The result, whether using lemonade or soda water, is an electric blue pint of almost luminous intensity which smells slightly of aniseed and is pretty much guaranteed to sweep your legs from beneath you somewhere around halfway down the glass, especially if the measures are 35 mill rather than 25. Roger says they aren’t called Blue Moons because of the colour but because they’re so horrendously expensive it’s only possible to afford them once in a blue moon.
I’ve known Roger since ’87. He’s gone from working in a video store to being a script writer, so displaying consistency and ambition. Over the last few years he seems to have developed a habit of writing the screenplays for various of my books which never then get made into films – Espedair Street, The Bridge, Dead Air – though we live in hope, I guess. The scripts are fine – inspired, in fact – but it’s just the usual film industry yes-no-ery when it comes to getting films financed. We’ve been through, I think it’s fair to say, a few scrapes together over the years. Roger is one of these people that makes me look eminently sober, sensible and sedate. I’ve already written his epitaph: Here lies the body of Roger Gray, the man who led himself astray. Roger thinks this is a really cool epitaph and has, worryingly, at times seemed almost enthusiastic about securing its imminent deployment on his gravestone.
Something of a tradition has grown up in the last few years or so of Roger staying with us over his birthday and the two of us – sometimes with other accomplices, sometimes not – having Blue Moons in the Café Royal Bar, on West Register Street, Edinburgh. For years we’ve turned up there in late April to find another new lot of bartenders who invariably look completely blank when we mention Blue Moons and who often have to be persuaded that making something like this is even legal before actually starting to put the blighters together.
We’d always kind of hoped Blue Moons would have become legendary amongst the staff in the intervening twelve months, or at least be remembered from one year to the next, but it has never happened. Until this year. When we turned up in the Café Royal in 2003 – in May, a little delayed – the bar manager we talked to not only remembered us and the Blue Moons, he’d made sure there was a bottle of blue curaçao in the cellar for when we did appear.
So we were happy. But then it’s hard not to be when supping a Blue Moon anyway. Our record, of which I assure you we are not proud, is three. Frankly, two is pushing it. Just one will tend to get you outrageously drunk if consumed at any speed – drunk to the point, for example, that having a second one gradually starts to seem like a fairly sensible and indeed only logical course of action. Quite how an idea that – it is solemnly agreed by all concerned beforehand – is Totally Idiotic somehow blurs through Well, Not To Be Dismissed Out Of Hand into Maybe Not Such A Bad Idea After All and then finally emerges fully transformed into Another One? Why, What An Absolutely Brilliant And Indeed Utterly Imperative Concept! is just one of life’s more intractable mysteries. The tricky thing is that it can only really be fully appreciated somewhere around two-thirds of the way down a Blue Moon in the first place, by which time all bets on common sense, logical thought, joined-up cogitation and indeed reliably focused bicameral vision are already long since profoundly off.
When you drink a Blue Moon you can actually feel your body becoming drunk; usually from the legs up. When this starts to happen getting off the bar stools in the Café Royal – if we haven’t managed to bag a table – takes some forethought and planning, because while your brain is innocently labouring under the delusion that it’s just sitting here drinking this kind of harmless-looking blue drink and feeling dreamily, unaccountably happy in a la-la-la sort of way, your legs know differently, and are no longer in reliable, uncorrupted communication with – or under the full control of – your brain. Neither of us have ever fallen over, but it’s always a concern.
The Café Royal and I have some history. It was here I had a drink with Mic Cheetham before she became my agent and discovered she was a Laphroaig fan too. I’d been in the fortunate position of being able to take my pick of agents after years of not having anybody to represent me. Until this point, James Hale, my editor, and Mary Pachnos, Macmillan’s rights director, both of whom were good friends, had made sure that I got a fair deal from the company, but when they were leaving Macmillan and I was leaving Faversham for Edinburgh, it seemed sensible to have independent professional representation.
I talked to half a dozen agents, all of whom were very pleasant and friendly and obviously extremely well qualified. To a man they each offered tea or coffee – one was going to take me to tea at the Ritz, though the hotel wouldn’t serve us because I was wearing black 501s – but Mic – Mary Pachnos’s suggestion as a possible agent – was the only one who suggested cracking a bottle of wine. Ah-ha, I remember thinking, this is a woman who knows that the way to a Scotsman’s heart is through his liver. A day later, when I was back in Edinburgh, supposedly thinking about my choice of agent (it was Mic, because we’d got on so well, but I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by seeming too precipitate), she flew up
to see her son, who was at Edinburgh University, and to convince me that she was the right agent for me. I think the Laphroaigs settled it.
I set a scene in Complicity here in the Café Royal. I’d noticed that they had a drinks gantry open from both sides with two identical bottles set back to back, so that it looked like a single set of bottles standing in front of a mirror. How cunning, I thought, and just the thing to confuse a very drunk person, so I had my central character, Cameron Colley, already slightly paranoid, start to think that he’d become invisible or a vampire or something when he thought he was staring at a mirror which wasn’t reflecting him.
That whole scene is a bit of a writer’s conceit; the friend Cameron’s talking to – who’s called Al, has a wife he refers to as Andi and makes just this one appearance in the novel – is Alexander Lennox, the never-directly-named central character in The Bridge; alive and well and, the implication is, married to Andrea, the woman he loves and thinks he might have lost during the course of the earlier novel. The idea was that Complicity, for all its final bleakness, does have a happy ending. It’s just that it isn’t its own happy ending, and it’s not at the end.
Oh, and when the two men head out of the Café Royal and visit a florist’s round the corner on St Andrew Street, there really was a florist’s shop there at the time; it was called Banks’s. (It’s wee pieces of nonsense like this that help make writing the sheer and total hoot it is.)
This May, Roger, his fiancée Izabella and I tackle the Blue Moons together after a visit to the Scotch Whisky Centre, close by Edinburgh Castle. We head there on foot.
I have never walked along Princes Street or up North Bridge without looking about me at this gloriously displayed riot of architecture, rock, hill and glimpsed, distant river and thinking, I love this beautiful city.
