Raw Spirit

by Iain Banks

  ‘Will you two stop it? I am not in any way—’

  ‘This could be a long week.’

  ‘Look, I am simply not—’

  ‘Aye. Right enough. What with Banksie getting tetchy so quickly.’

  ‘I am not getting tetchy!’

  I have to suffer more of this outrageous tetchiness slander in bursts all the way up the road through the Great Glen towards Inverness. This road, the A82, is pretty good; usually fairly busy, but with enough decent straights to allow some overtaking unless there are absurd amounts of oncoming traffic. There is one bit at the side of the imaginatively named Loch Lochy – my, must have been a hard night’s brain-wracking in the smoke-filled bothy to come up with that one – where there is a cliff on one side of the road and the loch on the other. This is one of the few places where I’ve always reckoned it’s relatively safe to speed – albeit only briefly and always providing the road is empty – just because there is so little likelihood of a sheep or a deer wandering out on front of the car. There are actually two straights, the southern one shorter than the northern, with a hotel on a sort of wiggle in the middle which spoils what would otherwise have been an even more impressive length of road, but it’s still a sweet stretch. And still no speed cameras. Amazing.

  The Jaguar takes even this section at a steady 60 or so; rolling along happily, its engine issuing a burbling roar as though it’s perpetually trying to clear its throat. The Jag is a very relaxing car to drive, even though it takes a little more concentration than a modern vehicle. It’s that suited-to-the-legal-limit thing again; you don’t feel that you ought to be going faster just because the car can handle it, and because you’re in no danger of being snapped by a speed camera or tripping a radar trap, you can stop worrying about that as well. It’s almost as though you’re driving in an era before there were such annoyances. Time warp driving. (You get that in the M5 too, though only in the sense that it goes so fast there are times when you’d swear you’ve arrived before you set off.)

  When I was a child and we drove this road we really did keep one eye on Loch Ness, just in case we saw the monster. Well, simpler times. Back then you could still just about believe that a few fuzzily photographed floating logs, grainy footage of boats’ wakes, one or two fairly obvious faked stills and the testament of a handful of people could add up to evidence that there was some throwback to the age of the dinosaurs haunting the dark depths of the great long loch.

  Then people got serious about it and set up viewing platforms with multiple still and film – later, video – cameras, sonar sensors and underwater microphones, and the sightings stopped.

  The Loch Ness monster seems to be one of those quantum creatures, maybe distantly related to Schrodinger’s Cat; its existence is only possible when there’s nobody there to observe it.

  A friend of mine called Ron Binns once wrote a book called The Loch Ness Mystery Solved, which basically went through all the evidence clear-eyed and unbiased and came to the fairly inescapable conclusion the whole monster thing was a load of old Highland bollocks, but because this wasn’t what people particularly wanted to hear, you’ll struggle to find the book in any loch-side tourist shop (though last time I was there they had a copy in Lochaber High School Library, so it might have helped sow the seeds of a healthy scepticism in a few young minds).

  Our musical accompaniment for the week in the Jag is largely retro, majoring on people like Graham Parker, John Mellencamp and Steve Gibbons, then at the chalet we listen to music by the at-this-point-not-quite-dead-yet Warren Zevon. I’ve brought what I thought was the best album of last year, By The Way by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and albums by Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club and lots of ‘The’ bands, like The White Stripes, The Hives, The Vines and The Strokes. I’ve also brought some Led Zep, Pixies, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and early Ozrics, but most of these don’t get played and the ones that do don’t really seem to meet with the positive reception I’d been hoping for.

  Back to Inverness. We’re only here because the self-catering chalet in Glenlivet we’re booked into for the rest of the week can’t take us until tomorrow. I thought self-catering would be a better idea for us three guys than a hotel, especially when Jim started talking about the size of the sound system we’d need to take with us, however for this first night we’re staying at the Highland Hotel in the centre of Inverness. This used to be the Station Hotel and Ann and I have stayed here a couple of times, once after a train journey from Kyle of Lochalsh and once en route to Thurso by train, heading for Orkney. I’d hoped to park the Jag in the wee square right outside the hotel entrance itself, but it’s full and I have to stick it round the corner in a car park at the back of the station. It was that or the nearby multi-storey. Should have gone for the multi-storey.

  The hotel, in a fit of wisdom which instantly marks it out as an extraordinarily sensible choice on my part, puts us in a sort of semi-private short corridor off the main part of one floor; there’s a set of doors then just our three rooms. I am relieved to see this. Our record in hotels is, ah, variable, you might say. I have never in my life been banned from a bar, pub or hotel, but I suspect I’ve come close a few times, and the majority of those occasions have involved Jim and Dave. Nothing serious, you understand, just good-natured boisterousness which may involve some exterior climbing, corridor wrestling, suspicious fumes, snorting noises and loud music. Stuck out here on a limb of the hotel, I feel we are much less likely than I’d feared to cause offence to any other guests, the staff or management.

  We hit the town. Inverness has many bars. We favour quite a few of them with our custom, then head for the Shapla, Inverness’ very favourably sited and most central curry shop. The city has a half-dozen or so sub-continental restaurants, a couple of which I’ve eaten in and would again and all of which I’ve heard good reports of, but I still tend to head back to the Shapla because it’s handy and it has a wonderful view over the river beside one of the main bridges; this is a great place for people-watching, car-and bike-spotting and just generally taking in the sight of the Ness flowing calmly between the curved banks with their mix of low-rise and generally handsome buildings.

  In the past at least, it’s just as well the view’s been there to distract the diner, because if there’s a criticism to be levelled at the Shapla it’s that the service can be a little on the relaxed side. Happily the food is worth waiting for, and in these fries-with-that? days a little deliberation over a meal is no bad thing, but I wouldn’t try to nip into the place for some quick nosh before catching a film or a play.

  We take in the view, take in the curry, and take in another couple of bars afterwards before heading back to the hotel for a last drink before the bar closes – I have a whisky, naturally – and then withdrawing to Jim’s room for a smoke (sufficiently drunk, I am by this time cadging cigarettes).

  It is decided that more drink is required so we order a bottle of wine on room service. I am in the bathroom – which is quite grand in an old-fashioned, white-tile sort of way – when the wine arrives, and so get to hear rather than see a kind of kinetic pantomime as Jim attempts to take the tray with the opened bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape and the glasses from the young night porter and simultaneously pay him (Jim has forgotten that all this is supposed to go on the bill).

  The tray (I am later told by Dave) unbalances as Jim attempts the transfer, sending the bottle in one direction, the tray in another and the glasses in a third, while the night porter guy watches the twenty-pound note wave about in front of his face as Jim attempts, at first, to catch all three of the separately directed articles as they begin to perform their distinct parabolas towards the floor.

  Instinct, thankfully, causes Jim to prioritise the still almost entirely full bottle as the object most in need of his attention, and he succeeds in block-catching it – the right way up – against the side of the television while hopping round and trying to break the fall of the glasses with one foot (the tray is, sensibly, left to its own devices). One
glass breaks; the other two survive, bouncing off the bed and carpet. The night porter finally takes the twenty from Jim’s outstretched fingers and, snorting with barely suppressed laughter, informs us he will return with another glass and a brush and pan, for the broken glass.

  All of this sounds hilarious from the bathroom; I start laughing quietly to myself and I’m still giggling when the night porter arrives with the brush and pan and replacement glass. I find myself going, ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo.’ (pause) ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo,’ a lot.

  I think there must have been some sort of positive feedback thing going on with the echo in the tiled bathroom, because after a while I’m laughing as much at the sound of my own laughter as at the scene I’ve had to create in my head from the sounds coming through the door.

  ‘You okay in there, Banksie?’ Dave asks.

  ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo,’ I tell him. ‘Pretty much.’ I wipe my eyes. ‘Was that another example of Brownian motion I heard there?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘The fog, Banksie,’ Jim says. ‘It was the fog.’

  ‘The what?’ Dave asks.

  ‘The fog,’ I tell him. ‘The Force Of Gravity. Was ever thus. Hoo-hoo-hoo.’

  ‘You finished in that fuckin bog, Banksie, or you having a bath or something? I’m dyin for a slash.’

  ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo. On my way out. Hoo-hoo-hoo.’

  The bottle of wine does nothing to make the incident any less funny over the next half hour or so, and I keep bursting into giggles.

  ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’

  Jim sighs. ‘Well, at least he’s not being tetchy.’

  ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Dave shakes his head.

  ‘Hoo-hoo-hoo!’

  ‘I think I preferred the tetchiness.’

  I am definitely not laughing the next morning when two bad things happen (before I get into this I better report that the buffet breakfast was very good and I bumped into a friend of Les’s who was there for a union conference). The lesser of the two bad things is that the Jag has been comprehensively shat upon by what would appear to have been a well-coordinated flock of very large and thoroughly diarrhoeic seagulls.

  The more important bad thing is that Jim is called back to Clydebank due to a family emergency, and has to jump on a train heading south. This all blows up really quickly; before it’s really sunk in we’re waving him goodbye and watching the train pull out. He’s told us he hopes to rejoin us in a couple of days, but it feels like the holiday is half ruined already.

  This was supposed to be the great reunion, the third part of the trilogy after two much earlier escapades. Longer ago than any of us likes to think about we drove round the Highlands, camping and Youth Hostelling, then a few years later, when we were all living down South we took a camper van from Faversham up to Scotland and through the Hebrides and the Highlands. There had been talk of a boat trip as the third big hol together, possibly on the Shannon in Ireland, maybe on the Caledonian Canal here in Scotland, but this had been postponed when the whisky-researching wheeze had suggested itself. (Apart from anything else, Jim and I could never agree on who should be captain if we hired a boat; Jim claimed he should be in charge because he’s piloted a boat on the Shannon already with Joan and the two boys, whereas I insisted that I ought to be in command because I – thanks to my dad being a first officer in the Admiralty – had nautical blood. My clinching argument, I was quite convinced, was that I still had one of my dad’s old peaked caps, complete with anchor and crown and all that sort of official-looking naval stuff, and what’s more it even fitted me, but for some reason this never carried the rhetorical or logical weight with Jim which I thought it so obviously merited.)

  Now we three are two, and while Dave is one of my very best friends and we’ve had some great times together – and I’m sure we’ll have a laugh over the next few days – it simply won’t be the same for either of us without Jim. There just seems to be a special chemistry when the three of us get together.

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘It’s not Jim’s fault, Banksie. He—’

  ‘I’m not talking about Jim!’ I shout. ‘I’m talking about whatever incontinent pterodactyl was responsible for this!’ I gesture at the Jag’s roof, bonnet, boot, windscreen and side windows, all of which are fairly comprehensively splattered. There’s even some crap on one of the tyres’ side walls. It looks like somebody’s thrown half a litre of white paint over the car from a second-floor window, then loaded up a handful of brushes with little gobbets of green, grey and yellow matte and flicked these over the resulting ghastliness as well.

  Dave inspects the car and nods. ‘Aye, it is a bit of a mess.’

  ‘A bit of a mess?’ I yelp. ‘It’s practically a fucking respray! I mean, look at it! What do the fuckers eat to produce shit like this? Fucking radioactive waste?’

  ‘That could be it, Banksie,’ Dave says. ‘Maybe it’s a giant mutant seagull which flew down all the way from Dounreay just to target your car. Do you want to open the car up now so I can put my bag in, or should I just break in via this faulty rear quarter light?’

  ‘I think the stuff’s glowing,’ I tell him, plipping the car open. ‘Do you think it’s glowing?’

  ‘No. But you’d better get it to a car wash; that seagull shit can damage paint.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’

  Dave dumps his bag on the back seat and looks at me warily. ‘You’re not going to get tetchy, are you?’

  ‘No!’

  After all this nonsense – and a visit to Safeway’s car wash which still doesn’t entirely remove all traces of the radioactive seagull dump – arriving at the Glen Ord distillery just outside Muir of Ord comes as a particular relief and feels like a return to normality. Dave and I do the tour.

  Glen Ord isn’t a very architecturally attractive distillery – it’s abruptly close to the road and dominated by the massive maltings buildings right next door – but it has a good tour with helpful guides and the way the place is laid out helps make the whole process particularly clear. Ord uses barley grown locally on the Black Isle. (Confusingly, the Black Isle is not an island, but rather the fertile peninsula north of Inverness lying between the Beauly/Moray Firths to the south and the Cromarty Firth to the north.)

  The maltings provides the barley for other Diageo-owned distilleries in the area and for Talisker, on Skye, though this receives malt with five times the peatiness compared to Ord itself. The peat comes from Drumossie Moor, south of Inverness and the water from the romantically entitled Loch of Smoke (mainly fed by spring water) and Loch of Birds (mainly rain water). Ord is another 95 per cent blend, 5 per cent single-malt whisky, but the latter – most commonly available as a 12-year-old, which is what I buy, presented in an attractively different roughly square-section bottle – is well worth a taste; malty, lightly but distinctly peated and richly sherried. It’s one of the sweetest expressions I’ve tasted, without being cloying. A very pleasant surprise.

  Ord is one of those whiskies which has changed a fair bit over the years, and in his astoundingly comprehensive Complete Book of Whisky, the patently extremely knowledgeable Jim Murray reckons they’ve ruined a distinctively earthy dram which was very much of its region to make just another sherried one which could have come from almost anywhere. I can’t comment directly, but it would be a shame if this was true, no matter how pleasant and drinkable Ord is. Anyway, if you want to try out some of the older expressions look out for bottles labelled Glenordie, Ordie or even just Ord; this is one of those distilleries which has been a little confused about its identity over the years.

  Oh yes, and until 1949 the place was lit by paraffin lamps. Bleedin paraffin lamps. What was that about flash photography again?

  On to Glenmorangie, just outside the town of Tain; a nicely turned-out distillery much easier on the eye than Ord. The place is quiet when we get there – in mid April – scaffolding up around the enormously high-necked stills. I’ve heard about these eccentrics and been looking forward
to seeing them in the copper. I get a glimpse inside the still room and, yup, these really are the giraffes of the still world; quite fabulously tall; double-decker bus in height.

  Quiet in the technical sense of having its annual refit, the place is still fairly busy with visitors; there’s a coach trip doing the rounds as we’re wandering about. Dave heads off to take more photos and I walk down under the railway line, past low warehouses. This is the line from Inverness to Thurso and Wick, a continuation of the rail route which skirts Dalwhinnie and Tomatin, and the same line which passes close enough to Bunchrew for you to hear the trains on a quiet morning.

  The Dornoch Firth lies quiet and salty-smelling beyond the little tunnel under the railway. Somehow it’s a surprise to be reminded that Glenmorangie is a seaside malt, though the scent of it is there in the whisky if you look for it. The coastline – hill and mountain, forest and beach, dune and cliff – tapers off into the calm and milky skies to the north.

  I know this whole area fairly well from when I was a Non-Destructive Testing Technician (Trainee) with a division of what was then called British Steel; a bunch of us stayed in a wee village called Portmahomack and worked – if that’s not overdignifying my efforts – at the North Sea Production Platform yard at Nigg, a few miles away from here, back in the late seventies. The Non-Destructive Testing we were doing consisted of using X-ray radiography and ultrasonics to check that the steel cylinders which would make up the legs of the production platforms wouldn’t collapse in a North Sea storm and kill all on board.

  The job was technically interesting and I met a few characters through it, but it was really just a way to make some money between writing books rather than any sort of career. Still, I have good memories of that summer, staying in Portmahomack, drinking and playing dominoes (badly) with my workmates, taking long walks along the deserted coastline, climbing the odd castle and generally soaking up the atmosphere, because the whole area was the major inspiration for the landscape featured in The Wasp Factory, and I just have a great fondness for that book and everything associated with it.