Raw Spirit (20 page)

The whisky itself is another of those undervalued ingenues that could stand a deal more promotion; full of sweet, roasted nut flavours and smokily spiced. Arguably the trouble is that there’s room for only so many distinguished malts even on the by now fairly well developed and knowledgeable world market; if you put a lot of money behind a whisky like Tomatin, you might just take market share away from other whisky without otherwise making much difference (more to the point for any given owner, you might take market share away from one or more of your own whiskies; this is one reason why manufacturers like to promote a selection of their whiskies together, probably the best known dating from when United Distillers – now Diageo – bundled whiskies like Cragganmore and Dalwhinnie together in their Classic Malts collection). I suppose the solution is simply for the single-malt market to get still bigger, so that there’s room for even more whiskies at every level.

There’s a house on the road up to the distillery itself which has a white mile-post-style sign in the garden that reads THIS WAY IS THAT WAY on one face, and THAT WAY IS THIS WAY on the other. This is not exactly Highland Existentialism, but it beats garden gnomes.

Inversneckie! Inverness was Europe’s fastest growing city in 2002, allegedly. Certainly feels like a busier place these days,
though
it’s not all change; the bit by the river hasn’t altered much since the Eden Court theatre was built and the new road bridge went up (not to mention the replacement railway bridge, required after the floods washed away most of the old one a few years ago). This is still a city where you occasionally see somebody fishing in the middle of it. The river Ness flows through the centre heading for the sea, shallow enough by the banks for people to stand there, water splashing round their waders, their lines creating great lazy 8-shapes in the air as the rods sweep slowly back and forth.

There’s a huge recently expanded shopping complex which we park in and which I get lost in but eventually, after some apparently compulsory clothes shopping, we make our way to Leakey’s before it closes. Leakey’s is a second-hand book shop housed in an old barn of a church near the centre of town. It’s packed with books, prints and maps, has a busy upstairs café and lots of paintings by local artists. In the cold months it’s heated by a colossal wood-burning stove the size of a shed which sits square in the middle of the place radiating warmth and making it feel welcoming even in the depths of winter. The place has become something of an Inverness institution and a landmark for bibliofiends and cartofans. The first time I came here I bought so many old maps I could hardly carry them. This time, while I’m checking that there aren’t
too
many of my books for sale in the Fiction section, my arms full of more old OS maps, Les finds the Food and Drink section and the old whisky books; I snaffle the lot, bar a couple of doublers, and need help to get them back to the car.

‘You actually going to read all this lot, Banksie?’ Les asks as we squeeze the motley collection of tightly straining carrier bags into the boot (most cars would have sagged significantly on their springs under the extra weight, but the M5’s made of sterner stuff).

I look at him blankly. ‘
Read
them?’ I think about this. ‘Well, some of them, I suppose.’ Les looks increasingly sceptical. I think some more. ‘Well, I’ll sort of scan all of them. I mean, I can’t claim I’m going to read every single word of every single one, not cover to cover.’

What can I say? I’ve been given an excuse to buy books; this isn’t something I am easily capable of ignoring. Even when I was a student and didn’t have much money, I’d buy every book on my reading lists as well as all the books I wanted to read for pleasure or because I thought they were actually necessary for my course work, for the simple reason that – like a reference book – a book on a book list didn’t need to be read; a book you felt you ought to have but didn’t need to read cover-to-cover was like a bonus for me; it meant more books on my shelves without the nagging guilt of not having actually read them all (at the time I refused to let a book defeat me; I even made it all the way through Sam Beckett’s
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable
trilogy. Took me about a month because I kept falling asleep, but I did it. I’m a little more relaxed about this sort of thing now; if a book hasn’t grabbed me in the first hundred pages or so, I just let it go).

At the time – and I do not exaggerate – I preferred to economise with my drinking money than cut back on the book-buying budget. Okay, I was an atypical student.

But anyway; of
course
I bought all the whisky books Leakey’s had! I can probably, I remind myself, even claim them against tax. But the main point is;
they’re books
. And I have a reason to buy them; I am almost beholden to buy them. I owe it to the whisky book to buy them, to my publishers, to my readers! It would be dereliction of duty not to buy them; they were there, they were for sale, I’m writing a book on the subject they’re all about; isn’t it
obvious
I have to rescue all of them?

In the end I do read all of them. Well, almost all of almost all of them; they end up covering a large part of a table to one side of my writing desk with lots of little strips of Post-It notes sticking out of them denoting Interesting Snippety Bits which at the time I’m totally convinced I’ll faithfully incorporate into this book, though when it comes to it the vast majority of them get ignored.

We stay at the Bunchrew Hotel, along the Beauly Firth east of Inverness. This is an old bishops’ palace set amongst a profusion of huge, mature trees. It stands right by the water at high
tide
and looks out over towards the Black Isle. It’s that shade of traditional pink that apparently used to be produced by mixing whitewash with pig’s blood (that’s what they used to do in the old days, I have it on good authority) and it has the pointiest pointy turrets you ever did see. Does lots of weddings.

Fine food, equally fine wine, a whisky or two, a good night’s sleep and another generous breakfast. We part at Glenfinnan the following afternoon and Ann sleeps most of the way down the A9. All right for her; I have a day to recover from all this good living then I’m back on the road and back to Speyside with my pals Jim and Dave for another week of intensive research.

8: Fear and Loathing in Glenlivet

‘THIS COULD BE
your best book ever, Banksie,’ Dave says.

‘Na,’ I tell him. ‘It could just be rubbish.’

Dave pauses for a moment. ‘Yeah, but it could be your best book ever, Banksie.’

Speyside part two; this time with Jim (S. Brown, erstwhile computer operator and shift leader, then publican and now help-desk supremo for Inverclyde Council) and Dave (McCartney, also one-time computer operator and shift leader, later manager, then publican, now enjoying a quieter life driving taxis) and the Jaguar.

The Jag: all the fruity flavour of yesteryear
.

Full description of the car: a 1965 Jaguar Mark II 3.8 with overdrive. Dark blue with grey hide. Wire wheels. Fully restored. With added Kenlowe fan, central locking, a decent CD multi-changer and beefed-up speaker system. Allegedly a Coombs conversion but with no louvred bonnet and – decisively – only two carbs, not three. Looks and sounds wonderful.

The Jaguar has what appears to be a power-assisted fuel gauge. The needle doesn’t just gently fall from Full towards Empty; it positively propels itself from one to the other under full acceleration, describing a shallow curve across the sweep
of
dial like the path of an artillery shell aimed at your wallet. It doesn’t help that the car has an embarrassingly small fuel tank, but the main reason the Mk II appears to – and does – drink like a filter-feeder is that it has an old-fashioned straight-six engine and those two temperamental carburettors to provide it with fuel and air.

The Jag is a relatively heavy car by modern standards, though there is an air of delicacy about the almost bubble-like passenger compartment (this is a very curvy car) and some of the controls. The suspension crashes and, from the sounds it makes, would appear to be constructed largely from wood, the engine roars like a camel which has just inadvertently snagged its undercarriage on a barbed-wire fence, it persistently smells of petrol despite the best efforts of various mechanics, it has a very occasional – but no less exciting for that – predisposition to throw itself out of third gear under hard acceleration, generally just when full power is required for a finely judged overtaking manoeuvre, its windscreen wipers are effete to the point of making the Land Rover’s look positively powerful, not so much clearing the rain from the windscreen as flapping hysterically over the glass, utterly panicked at the fact there’s water falling from the sky onto the car, there’s no air-conditioning or electric windows (though there is power-assisted steering and it does have upgraded, servoed brakes), however it is the proud possessor of an electrically operated overdrive, a dash-mounted starter button, a handbrake on the wrong side and, best of all, a foot-controlled dip switch.

I think this is my favourite Jag eccentricity; to dip the lights at night you have to tap with your shoe a stubby metal button mounted on the floor to the left of the clutch. I am just about old enough to remember foot-operated dip switches from when there was nothing especially unusual about such an arrangement, however I still find this hilarious.

Less amusing but more heartening is that when you drive an old car (and in some ways here, the older the better) you drive surrounded by smiles and general good humour. In an old car, unless you drive like an utter imbecile, you can generally
forget
about road rage. People grin when they see you, they smile, they stop and look and sometimes they wave, and if they make a digital gesture, it’s a thumbs-up, not a finger.

Part of this may be that an old car is seen as less of a threat, less of a declared, fully paid-up competitor in the day-to-day competition for road space and the battle to reduce one’s own journey time. But part of it, I suppose, is a kind of veneration we feel for the old in general, a feeling that they deserve credit for the fact they’ve made it to here through all the trials, challenges and vicissitudes that might have ended their existence earlier and so should be indulged and given peace in a gentle retirement. (Arguably nowadays, people feel this more towards old cars than they do to old people, which is sad, even shaming.)

Now that so many roads are so crowded, and speed cameras seem to be everywhere – when there is, in other words, not much point in having a car that goes faster than anybody else’s – this is a serious argument for driving a classic vehicle. You really do feel like you’re living in a sunnier, more pleasant, more relaxed and stress-free world.

Well, at least you do until they break down, which is one thing that classic cars are also very good at. This is when you realise that for all the blandness, homogeneity and supposed boringness of the modern motor vehicle in general and the family hatchback in particular, they represent a vast improvement in reliability as well as fuel efficiency, compared to their automotive forebears. Even so, modern cars have bits fall off and they grind spluttering to a stop too; it’s just that as a rule they do it much less often. Somehow it’s easier to forgive an old car for breaking down, plus – if you have any mechanical aptitude at all – it will generally be easier to effect a running repair to a classic.

Modern cars – and especially modern engines – are binary, digital; they tend to work either perfectly or not at all, and you’ll only be able to fix one if you happen to have 30 grand’s worth of electronic diagnostic equipment with you and a sealed unit to replace whatever black-box gizmo has just gone belly up. Classic cars are analogue; when they go wrong they’ll often
sort
of half-work, at least for a while, enough to get you home if you’re lucky, and sometimes all it takes to fix them is a screwdriver or the reconnection of a wire. So while the fact that they break down more often might reintroduce a measure of frustration into the ownership/driving experience, being able to get them going again without possessing a degree in electronics and the facilities of a big city dealership’s workshop actually feels quite rewarding; you feel reconnected to the world when this happens, able to make a difference, to identify a problem and sort it rather than just impotently hand it on to somebody who will take it away, deal with it out of sight and return it.

There is also a kind of comfort to be had from having a vehicle that is most happy at legal speeds. It’s an unfortunate irony that speeds and levels of road holding previously only attainable in expensive and exotic machinery are now easily reached in the average modestly specified hatchback just at the time that our crowded, high-surveillanced highways have rendered the use of such abilities difficult, dangerous and (sometimes even reasonably) illegal. So a car that feels happiest at velocities of a non-nabbable nature makes perfect sense.

The Jag is like this – it feels fine on the motorway at about 70 and happy enough at 60 on the open road – and so is the Land Rover, just because of its gearing and the fact that it has the aerodynamics of a light industrial unit. (So, too, oddly enough, is our old 911, though this is entirely because it’s a soft-top.)

The Jag, of course, comes from the time when our speed limits were set. Back then people were happily revving Mk IIs up to 120 and above, however – despite the fact that my one’s been fully restored and according to our local garage is probably in better nick than the day it rolled out of the factory back in 1965 – I’ve never had it above 90, and have no intention of going anywhere near that figure again. The Jag feels its age at these speeds; it complains, it roars and wheezes and there are suddenly all sorts of new vibrations coming from practically every part of the car that argue against exploring further.

The Jag is just starting to get unhappy at about 75. The M5,
on
the other hand, treats twice that velocity like this is the sort of speed it’ll be happy with all day, thank you. By the time it’s doing 150 – just 5 m.p.h. short of its factory-set limiter; an unrestricted M5 allegedly hit over 170 – it’s growling a little louder, certainly, and you’re aware that you’re surrounded by a jet-like rush of slipstreaming air, but the car just settles down, seems to fix the horizon with a steely glare and thunders on, composed and steady. Instead it’s the driver who’s on edge, not the car; you’re constantly just about to switch pedals with your right foot as a truck or slower car pulls out and you have to brake. In fact you’re travelling so quickly you have to react pretty quickly the instant you see a distant sign announcing a limit on the autobahn.