by Iain Banks
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 li
ttle 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.
That the nearly 40-year-old Jag feels about right at our national speed limits – even given that it was a serious performance car in its day, the sixties equivalent of the M5 – does highlight how daft these limits sometimes feel in a modern car. Not often, perhaps, and with decreasing frequency, but now and again – for example on certain wide, straightish, flatish Highland roads, especially if they’re fenced or the country on either side is clear enough for the driver to spot any wildlife approaching the road – 60 feels idiotically slow.
On the other hand, sometimes 60 feels far too fast even when in theory it’s what you’re allowed to do. Like a lot of drivers I have my own set of speed limits on roads I know well; often they’re a bit faster than the legal ones, but sometimes they’re a lot slower. One route I take regularly passes through three villages with no posted speed limits but I treat them like 30 or 40 zones according to the conditions, and I suspect that all other drivers who aren’t complete nutters do the same thing.
Ultimately cars are useful but dangerous things and we have to decide where we draw the line between allowing them to remain useful and attenuating the threat they pose. Having no speed limits would be one slightly insane solution (you’d just have to charge people with dangerous driving if they caused death, injury or damage, though of course by then it’s too late for whoever was killed or injured), but, then, if you’re really, really serious about reducing those killed and injured on the roads, why not set the national speed limit at three miles per hour? No, seriously. Then if somebody found themselves in the path of a car or a truck or a bus they could just stroll out of the way. You might manage a whole year with no road deaths whatsoever. Obviously the economy would collapse and we’d all effectively become hermits, but then maybe it would lead to the revival of the railways, with branch lines everywhere. Mind you; trains crash too. Maybe they should have a walking-pace speed limit as well … And let’s not even start on aeroplanes. I suppose balloons and dirigibles – so long as they’re helium filled – might be okay.
The three-mile-an-hour national speed limit is arguably an even madder idea than no speed limits at all, but it has a certain logic to it and it forces us to confront the question: how much do we value human lives? What exactly are we prepared to give up to save some?
However, let’s not forget that this is all within the context of a society that doesn’t get all that bothered over the fact that in excess of one hundred and ten thousand Brits die every year from smoking tobacco, or the fact that alcohol abuse kills tens of thousands too. Three thousand people die every single day from malaria, but they’re mostly children and in Africa so they don’t matter, it would seem. One injustice doesn’t excuse another, but let’s at least admit that we prioritise and contextualise our outrage at unnecessary death.
One conducts the Jaguar through to Greenock and thence to Dalmuir, in Clydebank. In Greenock one collects one’s friend Mr David McCartney. In Clydebank one picks up one’s other chum, Mr James S. Brown.
The Jag is a quite different car to drive after the M5, but by Clydebank I’ve just about acclimatised. Clydebank is a semi-post-industrial district of high- and low-rise schemes and mostly abandoned shipyards which was bombed heavily in the Second World War and has picked up many more scars since. It has its pleasant areas, there’s been some redevelopment and Dalmuir itself is quite leafy in places, but the general area has its problem patches too: poverty, poor health and violence, much of it drug-related.
Substances: the usual disclaimer.
[As ever, what we call drug-related violence is really drug-prohibition-related violence, and the drug which is by far the most commonly associated directly with violence is alcohol. In the – hopefully unlikely – event you sincerely believe that our current drug laws are mostly fairly sensible but just not applied with sufficient stringency, please feel free, of course, to ignore this paragraph, as it has some connection to common sense and therefore does not remotely concern you.]
The drive up Loch Lomond side, across Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe is necessarily a little more sedate than it would have been in the BMW, but the Jag can pick up its skirts and make an overtaking dash when it needs to all the same, and the engine sounds great when it’s gunned, like a Tyrannosaurus fart sampled and played back at 960 b.p.m. Standard overtaking technique is to drop out of overdrive and plant the right foot. It’s an electrically switched overdrive unit so you’re not supposed to need to declutch when engaging or disengaging, but I always do, in deference to the Jag’s age.
Corners with lots of white paint are usually taken out of overdrive too, just to get the car better balanced on its rear suspension under power (in the M5 you’d just breeze through on a constant throttle opening with nary a thought. This is one of the most noticeable effects of a really fast car asked to tackle ordinary roads at a relative dawdle; the corners seem to disappear and the road effectively becomes one long straight – blimey, at legal speeds the M5 probably thinks there are only about three bends in the whole of Scotland).
The three of us know this route well, but from Loch Lomond onwards it’s still breathtaking.
‘Nice lake, eh, Banksie?’ Jim says.
‘Yeah yeah yeah, very fucking funny.’
I moved to London from Gourock at the very end of 1979 and started work as Law Costs Draughtsman in April of 1980. For the first few months I stayed at Dave’s flat in Belsize Road. He’d been the first of the people I knew in Greenock to move down to London – I was about the third or fourth – but eventually it seemed like almost everybody I’d known back in Inverclyde was living in London. Jim moved down a year or so after me. He ended up working for a firm called Save and Prosper, which I said at the time was a little like King Herod working for Mothercare, but then I can be cruel. Ann and I met at work shortly after I’d joined the firm, then moved in together the following year. In 1983 we went to live in Faversham, in Kent, closer to Ann’s parents in Canterbury but still a reasonable commute to London.
I will never be allowed to forget the fact that once, when Ann and I had the house in Faversham and Jim still lived in London, the three of us were on holiday, driving north up the side of Loch Lomond, when Jim suggested stopping to take a photograph of the view looking back the way we’d come, and I said something like, ‘Yeah, I think there’s a lay-by just round this corner, you can get a good view down the lake from there.’
‘The what, Banksie? A good view down the what?’
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘I said “lake”, didn’t I?’
Ann was laughing quietly.
Jim shook his head, a great big smile on his face. ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear. You’ve been down south far too long, El Bonko.’
‘And you’re going to tell everybody, aren’t you?’
He shrugged as we pulled into the lay-by. ‘You’ve brought it on yourself, pal; I’ve no sympathy. Anyway, if I’d said something like that, would you let me off? Eh?’
I thought about this. I sighed. ‘Fair enough.’
We stop for a fag break at Fort William – smoking is banned in the cars. It’s another fabulous day and the weather is getting positively warm. We stand in the loch-side car park at the southern end of the town centre and look out at the loch and the hills on the far side.
Dave is the oldest of the three of us; just over 50 now (we work out that 50 is our average age). Like me he’s bearded, though even greyer; almost white. Jim looks exactly like Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown, something I find startling. Not as startling as he d
oes, though.
‘Really?’ He looks quite pleased.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I tell him. ‘Though it has to be said that Robert De Niro looks pretty shit in Jackie Brown.’
Jim sniffs. ‘Well, fuck off then.’
Dave is our official driver for the week and is even getting paid for the privilege, the vestigial remnant of the garrulous Glaswegian in the original concept for this book (well, it is his profession, and taxi drivers don’t get paid holidays). He walks round the car, kicking the Jag’s tyres. ‘You sure this old thing’s up to taking us round Speyside for a week?’
‘It’s the youngest of the the four of us, Dave,’ I tell him, pointedly. ‘And it hasn’t let us down yet, has it?’
‘Hmm,’ Dave concedes, ‘not yet.’
‘Exactly, and has anything fallen off?’
‘Aye,’ Jim says. ‘That dooberry off the rear quarter light.’
‘That doesn’t count! It’s just a bit off the locking mechanism!’
‘The locking mechanism?’ Dave says. ‘Right. So the car can get broken into easily. Tut-tut, Banksie. Hope the boot locks.’
I look at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Climb in and we’ll find out.’
‘Oh-oh. He’s getting tetchy,’ Jim says to Dave.
‘I am not getting tetchy.’
‘Aye,’ Dave agrees. ‘First day and all. Thought we’d go longer than that before he started getting tetchy.’
‘Look, I’m not—’
‘First afternoon, in fact. That’s extreme tetchiness. Even by Banksie The King of Tetch standards.’