Raw Spirit (12 page)

But enough about Glenfinnan’s second greatest scourge. The rain’s not that terrible, after all; wear a jacket with a hood or carry a brolly and you’ll be fine. The real question is, What about those bastarding midges?

The midge: microscopic megascourge
.

The highland midge (there are other types, but let’s stick to the main culprit) is a tiny little winged insect with the ability, en masse, to ruin evenings, days, weeks and entire holidays for human beings. They are, basically, microscopic vampires; newly impregnated females need a drink of blood to nourish the next generation of midges, and they seem to have a preference for large mammals, especially large mammals with not much hair. Us, in other words.

Really they’re feeble, fragile little things, unable to fly faster than about six miles an hour – so a modest breeze sends them to ground, and running away, if you can, is surprisingly effective – plus they’re damaged by bright sunlight, so tend to avoid that too. Despite such weaknesses they have a powerful negative effect on the tourist trade of the west of Scotland and on the quality of life of most people who live there. They’d ruin the summer for the rest of Scotland too if they could, but they’re only really happy where the land receives more than about 1250 millimetres of rain per year, and in Scotland that basically means the side that faces out into the prevailing westerly airstream.

They breed best in peaty, acidic soil with lots of standing water, they love still, overcast days and balmy evenings and they tend to appear between the end of May and the start of September. And they are, collectively, voracious. The Highlanders of old had an especially horrendous punishment which consisted of stripping the convicted person naked and leaving them staked out overnight during the midge season. A midge will only take about a ten millionth of a litre with each bite,
so
even after a few tens of thousands of bites the victim was never going to be bled to death, but they did, allegedly, stand a very good chance of going mad. Anybody who has ever been subject to a sustained midge attack for even a few minutes – especially when they start to get into your eyes and up your nose – will sympathise.

There are, however, two saving graces, one for people who only visit the Highlands for short periods, the other for everybody. The first is that it’s the body’s own reaction to the midge bite that distresses rather than the bite itself, and that reaction takes two or three days to develop, so if you’re only on the west coast for a weekend you may never notice the damn things. The second is that some wonderful person has invented a midge trap that actually appears to work. This device wafts out carbon dioxide – which is what the midge homes in on, thinking it’s the exhaled breath of a big, juicy mammal – then a sort of modified vacuum cleaner sucks the little bastards into an extremely fine mesh net. This can clear a significant area of even a really badly midge-infested site and could even, conceivably, just possibly, let people in Highland hotels and back gardens sit outside of an evening. If this all works in the real world and not just under controlled conditions, the inventor deserves to become a multi-millionaire and have statues erected to him or her from Stranraer to Ullapool.

Anyway, Glenfinnan is midge central. We went out one evening years ago and left a light on and a window open at the McFarlanes’ house; when we came back there were so many midges on the angles between the walls and the ceiling it was as though somebody had taken a can of black spray paint and sprayed slowly from one corner to the next. We all just stood and stared, aghast, until Aileen – unknowingly anticipating this new midge-hoovering device – got the vacuum cleaner out and removed the little horrors that way.

Actually midges would drive you to strong drink too, for the anaesthetic effect if nothing else. I’ve even heard of people smearing whisky onto their skin to act as a short-lived deterrent to the little fiends, though it has to be pointed out that a)
it
had better be a blend, b) this should only be done under conditions of extreme desperation, and c) there’s little proof it works.

We’re back home, between Islay and Speyside (via Glenfinnan). The war continues. Bush and Blair meet at Camp David to assure everybody it’s all going splendidly and those pesky weapons of mass destruction will be found, gee, real soon now.

I find myself looking at Blair and hating his self-righteous, Bush-whipped ass the way I only ever hated Thatcher before. I look at Dubya and just see a sad fuck with scared eyes; a grotesquely under-qualified-for-practically-anything daddy’s boy who’s had to be greased into every squalid position he’s ever held in his miserable existence who might finally be starting to wake up to the idea that if the most powerful nation on Earth – like, ever, dude – can put somebody like
him
in power, all may not be well with the world. Dubya is that worst of all things, at least at this level of power and influence; a cast-iron, 100 per cent, complete and total loser who’s somehow lucked out and made it to the very top.

However. Enough. The next leg of the whisky-book-researching tour beckons. There were pals to see, vehicles to be driven, roads to explore, people to meet, distilleries to tour, drink to drink and fun to be had, and bottles of whisky waiting to be bought at each of the distilleries I visited. I must not get upset at the thought of my taxes helping to pay for this war shit. Hell, I’d just try harder when the time came to convince the tax people that the bottles of booze were absolutely necessary for my research into the book’s subject, and therefore a legitimate business expense. (I had thought of claiming them as expenses off Random House, but Oliver the Editor had gone a little pale when I’d tested the air in this direction and so I thought I’d probably better try the tax man instead.)

For this leg of the malt-researching multi-tour, we were going to take the M5. I have always liked big fast saloons. A BMW 5-series is a moderately big car (not long ago it would have
been
regarded as a just plain big car), and the quickest type of 5-series is the M5. With the M5 you get all the benefits of the generic 5-series; it’s a well-designed, well-built, dynamically well-sorted and very reliable motor with the usual extras people have come to expect in a new car these days, except in the M5 you get all that plus a stonking five-litre, 400-horsepower V8 engine nestled under the bonnet to make life interesting. There are various uprated bits to cope with the extra power, but it’s the engine you’ll tend to notice. Well, until you need the brakes, which are equally powerful.

The M5 was the first car I’d had the patience to specify, order and then accept delivery of. I suppose I had just become accustomed to buying second-hand, when there’s no real wait; a car is either available or not. When I had the money to afford a new car (i.e. too much; if you’re a private individual and being sensible with your money arguably you’ll always buy second-hand) – and especially when I had the money to afford a new car that was fairly high performance and therefore not usually readily available straight off the forecourt – I’d get frustrated that I was going to have to join a queue and wait for up to a year, and so usually ended up taking a demonstrator model, or a cancelled order for somebody else.

This latter option led to a 911 which had what Ann insists to this day was an orange interior. I still maintain it was terracotta, but the degree of garishness was one small factor in trading that car in for the M5. We ordered it in black with black and blue leather and something called privacy glass rear and side windows. Only the windows were really a mistake; they’re a bit darker than we’d anticipated and make the car look like a gangsta’s wheels, but never mind; you don’t notice them when you’re driving it.

The M5 is fast in a generous, raspingly, burblingly bounteous way. It sweeps through corners like a sports car and then surges towards the horizon on a tsunami of torque and a creamy purr of sound.

I am, as you might have gathered, a fan.

Blame caravans. I can still remember the sinking feeling I
used
to get, years ago, driving in summer along a road I knew fairly well and seeing a caravan in the distance, knowing that there were few or no safe overtaking opportunities ahead and that I was going to be stuck behind this giant off-white rear-end for the next half-hour or so. I got balefully used to this happening, puttering along watching the blinds in a caravan rear window swinging gently to and fro as some struggling Escort in front tried to haul it round a bend. This at least gave me time – oh, lots and lots of time – to meditate on the bizarre and even deceitful nature of caravan nomenclature. Caravans must have some of the most thoroughly inappropriate names on the road. They’re called things like
Typhoon
and
Buccaneer
. What they should be called, of course, is stuff like
A Nice Cup Of Tea
, or
Matching Tartan Blanket and Thermos Flask
or
Nice Out Again, Isn’t It? Reginald And Me Were Thinking Of Popping Down The Pitch And Putt Later If The Rain Holds Off, Do You Fancy Coming?
But no, they get called
Bohemian
or
Ninja Stealth Bomber Hyper Extreme
or something.

Anyway, the point is that I had all this time to contemplate such cerebral matters because the cars I could afford to drive back then were so slow it was only when we got to a long clear straight that it became possible even to think about overtaking the offending cream lumberers.

But no more. Nowadays I whip past their white-with-a-hint-of-beige arses with a throaty rumble of snarling engine note and a nonchalant one-two of the wrists. When I see a caravan ahead now, I think, Ha-ha! Prey!

Having said all that, the M5’s got a towing hitch.

It’s not for caravans, specifically, however; it’s for trailing boats. For this next week of distillery-visiting I was going to enlist the help of my friends Les and Aileen, from Glenfinnan. As it’s the start of April, it’s also about the time when our boat would anyway be emerging from its winterisation process in a big boat-filled shed in Grangemouth and have to be trailed to Loch Shiel, where it spends its summers, so I’m combining the two tasks.

The boat is an Orkney 5/20; it has a very small cabin you can squeeze about four people into if it’s raining (see above),
a
more generous open deck area, a 30 horsepower motor and a depth gauge/fish finder. Most people probably use boats like this for fishing, not that we do much fishing. We call it The Boat. It was called The New Boat for a while, while the boat we now talk of as The Old Boat was still just The Boat, but now what was The Boat is The Old Boat and what was The New Boat is just The Boat. Hope that’s clear.

The Old Boat was a Drascombe Lugger I bought off a policeman in Glasgow, years ago; it was a more versatile and characterful boat than the Orkney, but it was showing its age; we retired it to Fife when we bought the Orkney a few years ago, then last summer I took it down to Cornwall to one of my cousins with whom, hopefully, it’ll start yet another new life.

The great thing about the Lugger is that as well as having a small (very small) engine for puttering around, and being rowable (if a bit heavy for rowing any great distance), it has two masts and three sails. And not just your standard namby-pamby effete white sails, either; these were tan sails, manly sails, butch sails; sails that looked like they’d been dipped in Forth Bridge paint before being hoisted to the winds.

The Lugger isn’t fast using any of its three power sources, but it has always felt sturdy and reliable, and it’s fun just because boats are fun. It’s even moderately safe for singlehanded sailing because it’s loose footed. This means that there’s no dirty great lump of wood hanging out underneath the bottom of the main sail, so it’s much harder to knock yourself out than it is on an ordinary sailing boat.

We all had many happy seasons coasting down Loch Shiel under those tan sails, but the Orkney is more practical and gets where it’s going a lot quicker. Actually it feels like a speedboat to Les and me after years of waiting for the Lugger’s original 4hp motor to break surface tension and actually move us anywhere, though we still haven’t tried the water-skiing experiment yet. The other thing we haven’t got round to is Les and Iain’s Guide to Sensible Sailing, a video to demystify the confusing world of nautical terminology.

* * *

Les and Iain’s Guide to Sensible Sailing
.

(Sample dialogue)

Les: Now, Iain, I believe some people would call this a sheet, is that correct?

Iain: Well, that’s right, Les, they would. However I think you’ll find that the correct technical name for what you’re holding there is, in fact, a ‘rope’. A sheet is something you put on your bed.

Les: I see. And if I put this ‘rope’ over here, that would be on the port side of the boat, near the bows, yes?

Iain: No, port is a drink. Made in Portugal, by the way, so it’s quite easy to remember where it comes from. No, that’s what we call the ‘left’ side of the boat, at the ‘front’.

… You get the idea. We took it too far, of course. Masts became sticks and sails big flappy things. I mean, really.

It’s yet another amazingly good day. One of the compensations of trailing the boat and so having to stick below 50 is that there’s more time to look around at the scenery; I drive this route via Lochearnhead and Glencoe a lot but it never ceases to amaze. The air is so clear the sunlight seems bright as mid-summer, but because it’s early April the snow still coats the mountain tops, sparkling like icing sugar. The ragged scatter of lochs across Rannoch Moor are deep blue on one side of the road, light blue and glittering on the other, already surrounded by fresh growing grass and rushes and a carpet of tiny, early flowers.

A single day like this isn’t so unusual, but this is just the latest dry, warm day in a very dry winter and a positively sunny and almost balmy early spring. It’s been a year of unseasonable weather all round, it feels. In late February Ann and I were in Cyprus with her parents, staying in a villa near Pissouri looking out across to the British base at Akrotiri in one direction and the Troodos mountains in the other. We weren’t exactly expecting Death Valley heat in February, but apparently the snow we got was unusual, too; the locals were out taking photographs of the stuff because it hadn’t snowed in Pissouri for nearly 30 years.