by Iain Banks
Some of the ancient, semi-desolate flavour of this long-lived-in place came out when Ann, Oliver and I took a turn off the main road from the Jura ferry and drove up to a small loch set in the low hills near Ballygrant. Finlaggan is where, on a small island set in the loch and connected to it then by a drowned causeway and now by a new wooden walkway, there was once the political and spiritual headquarters of the Lord of The Isles.
This was from a time when Scotland was supposedly united, yet still contained various chieftainships and clan lands which were something close to little primitive principalities in their own right. Most separate – almost independent, in practice – was the Lordship of The Isles. Back then social, political, economic and military cohesion was most easily guaranteed by the relative ease of access to and from the sea, not the land. One good ship would take you round any coast with material and matériel but getting to anywhere through the forests, crags and bogs meant hacking out a specific path or using the tracks an enemy would know much better than you. So the sea – and Scotland’s multitudinous lochs – provided an easier highway, if you had the talent for it.
Finlaggan was the centre of a small maritime empire for a time; you can stand in the old chapel, in the remains of the old houses and fortifications, and look around in the silence at the rushes bowing in the wind and the swans gliding by, and stare down at the old carved stones capping the graves and try to imagine the people who’ve passed this way.
The gravestones, with their staring images of the long-time dead, are covered with sparklingly clean perspex supported by thick little metal legs, to keep the weather off. They look like very low and slightly surreal coffee tables, and oddly like art.
Back home, we watch the continuing war on TV. Still no nukes turning up, still no biological agents, still no chemical weapons. The ugly mutations, the poisons, the corrosiveness are present though, just not where people are looking for them. Gary Younge, an award-winning Guardian journalist who’s just moved to the States, is on Channel 4 in a short programme about the effects of the war in the US homeland. He reports on a lawyer who wore a T-shirt saying Give Peace a Chance to a shopping mall in mid America. The other side of the man’s T-shirt displayed a peace symbol.
He was told by a security guard either to take the T-shirt off or to leave the mall immediately. The lawyer protested that his right to free speech was enshrined in the US Constitution (for all my many issues with present-day America, I’ve always admired the seriousness and genuineness with which Americans take, uphold and believe in this right). But no dice these days. The security guard summoned a cop, who promptly arrested the lawyer.
And so we bid farewell to the Land of the Free …
5: The Heart of the Water
NOW THEN. GLENFINNAN. There are quite a few places that can justly claim to be the midge capital of Scotland and Glenfinnan is several of them. It also rains a lot. When my friend Les first moved to Fort William to start work as a teacher, it rained every single day for the first six weeks he was there. Not a continual, apocalyptic biblical downpour, obviously – well, not every week – but at least one shower in every 24 hour period, and usually a lot more than that. Even for a man raised in Greenock, that’s a lot of rain.
I suppose I ought to explain here, for those of you not well versed in the geographical ranking structure of Scottish Iffy Weather Areas, that Greenock has something of a reputation in the west of Scotland for being a rainy old place (the west of Scotland has something of a reputation in the rest of Scotland for having more than its fair share of precipitation, too, and it is probably fair to say that Scotland itself is perceived as being a tad rainier than the rest of Britain, while Britain as a whole is not necessarily a prime contender for the first word your average foreigner would come up with when asked to free associate with the word ‘desert’, or ‘arid’).
Basically Greenock is the Manchester of Scotland; people make jokes about how much it rains.
There’s always somewhere. In Norway it’s Bergen. When I first went there, hitch-hiking round Europe back in 1975, I heard my first – and for a long time, only – example of Norwegian humour: An Oslo man goes to Bergen on holiday. It rains without pause for a fortnight. At the end of his holiday, as he’s entering the station to take the train back to Oslo – shaking out his brolly, wringing out his tie, whatever – he sees a small boy and says, ‘Tell, me, small boy, does it always rain in Bergen?’ and the small boy says, ‘I don’t know, I’m only five years old.’ Oh well, maybe you had to be there; if you’re wet through and living inside a permanently anchored dark grey rain cloud with only the prospect of a half-year-long winter when the heavy rain turns to heavy snow to look forward to I guess you too would grasp at anything to relieve the gloom.
Even so, six weeks without a totally dry day was probably some sort of record even for Scotland’s west coast, and might, just possibly, have excited comment in Fort William, if anybody apart from Les had been counting. Les began to think he might have made a mistake. However, as the year wore on, a subsequent pleasantly hot and sunny summer – well, technically a brief but welcome Indian summer; okay, actually a warmish and not unduly damp weekend some time in late October – alleviated some of this feeling of doom and after a few years watching from a flat in Upper Achintore as the rain clouds drifted slowly up Loch Linnhe, Les and his wife-to-be Aileen decided to look for a house to buy. Aileen, also a teacher, was brought up in Cumbernauld, where it rains so little that the weather is probably only a few places higher on the average inhabitants’ List of Conversational Standbys than it would be for your standard Scot.
Naturally, after all that rain, they were looking for a change, and so settled on a place a mere fifteen miles down the road from Fort William but with a profoundly different microclimate and in a wholly different league when it comes to heavy drizzle, lashing rain, day-long downpours and sudden but prolonged thunderous tumults of water crashing without respite from leaden skies; in Glenfinnan it really knows how to rain. People notorious for having had the bad luck to have been born and raised in Fort William during a particularly catastrophic sequence of above-averagely rainy decades of seriously god-awful drenchingness – and hence no strangers to having apparently unending successions of black, moisture-laden cumulonimbi queuing up above their town to deposit megatons of water apparently targeted specifically on that individual’s cagoule hood – have been known to blanch and stagger when confronted with the prospect of spending longer in Glenfinnan than the amount of time it takes to drive – splashing – through it.
Glenfinnan has been, for several proud sequences of years, officially the rainiest place in Britain. There is, allegedly, a small village in the Lake District that occasionally beats it in the We’re Wetter Than You Are stakes, however this is only believed to happen when the rain-measuring device in this sorry hamlet actually slips into the lake concerned and thus gives a false and indeed unfair reading (or so the proud, damp, inhabitants of Glenfinnan will tell you, loath to surrender a distinction which, while they are unable to work to help achieve, they most certainly suffer for to be allowed to claim).
Having said all that, I’ve been going to Glenfinnan for nearly twenty years now. I absolutely love the place and an amazingly high number of my memories of it seem to be of stunning, glorious, breathtaking scenery baking under a high sun set in a totally cloudless sky of surpassing blueness.
Yep, beats me too.
But, hey, if it didn’t rain in Scotland, we wouldn’t have all that water to make whisky with, now would we? In fact, arguably, if all that at least partially rain-engendered Gaelic misery hadn’t needed relieving in the first place, whisky would never have been invented at all. Sitting in your cold, sodden hovel, wrapped in the ragged remains of a barely glorified blanket, ankle deep in animal excrement and choking on peat smoke while your wife wails a lament for her sisters who died giving birth and your children cough consumptively as they quietly work out how soon they can run away to the Lowlands or America and le
ave you with all the work to do is a pretty damn sure-fire way of turning a chap’s mind towards some sort of means to alleviate the sheer bloody awfulness of existence, via the ingestion of home-grown mood-altering substances if that’s what it takes.
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.