Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

by Iain Banks

  And, for some strange reason, I love this vehicle.

  I never thought this would happen. I am a petrol-head, I confess. I like cars, I like motorbikes, I’m pretty fond of most modes of transport but I especially love stuff I can drive myself, because I just plain enjoy driving. My favourite fairground ride was always, and is still, the dodgems, for that very reason; you are – at least marginally – in control. Once I accepted that going the wrong way round and trying to hit as many people as possible – while exciting – was against the rules and promptly got you thrown out, I played it the other way round, trying to have as few collisions as possible; this was slightly less exciting, but much more satisfying. (The attraction of the modern extreme theme-park ride, where the competition amongst the designers seems to be to discover who can terrify the captive customer the most in the shortest time, almost entirely escapes me).

  I strongly suspect that if I still lived in the south-east of England I wouldn’t enjoy driving so much – or I’d do a lot of track-day stuff – but because I’m lucky enough to live where I want, in Scotland, and Scotland, away from the central belt (indeed still in places within it) is full of great driving roads, I have a deeply full and fulfilled driving life and a rather splendid ongoing relationship with my vehicles of choice and the roads I use them on.

  So what am I doing driving a three-tonne diesel device with the aerodynamics of a scaled-up half-brick and apparently officially classed as a bus? And not just driving it, but really getting a kick out of driving it? I mean, this thing is trapped in the sixties: no air conditioning, no central locking, not even electric windows, and as for air bags: Ha! Air bags? Air bags? Defenders aren’t especially soothing and pleasant places to be when they’re the right way up and the road ahead is smooth and straight; you weren’t seriously expecting to have a crash in comfort, were you?

  What on earth do I see in this motorised Portakabin, this crude, noisy, rattly, stilt-tyred throwback with a comedy heating system that takes twenty minutes from cold to produce the first slight, damp hint of just-about-above-ambient-temperature air from its wheezing vents, whose turning circle is rivalled for tightness by your average canal narrow boat, whose front seat belts are cunningly sited so that they naturally fall into a position where they jam the door when you close it and whose aerodynamics are bettered by most motor homes and several bungalows? What can be the attraction?

  Well, for one thing, the Land Rover has been chipped; something called a Stage Two Conversion has upped its horse power by 50 per cent, replacing – or at least reprogramming – the original engine management chip and fitting a beefier turbo (the ‘T’ in Td5 stands for ‘Turbo’, and it’s a five-cylinder diesel engine).

  This does not exactly transform the Land Rover into a Ferrari, but it does mean you can keep up with normal traffic and can tackle long motorway inclines without the ignominy of having to slow and change down from top gear (it has five forward gears, but could use a sixth). Keeping the original gears means that you do tend to have to whisk through them pretty quickly on the way up – there aren’t many cars where you can comfortably change up to top gear at 40, even while going uphill – and the thing does feel a bit overrevved at motorway speeds. Still, there are useful peaks of acceleration to be found. You can sweep past startled slower drivers and caravans in the Land Rover, too, in other words; you just have to remember to slow down for the bends.

  And you can do things to them; customise them, fit what is, in effect, chunky Landy jewellery to them, like ladders up the back, wading snorkels up the front, vehicle-long roof-racks, foot-plates on the wings so you can stand on them without scratching them, dinner-plate-sized driving lights, rear spotlights, front towing hitches (they pretty much all have rear towing hitches). There’s even stuff you can do yourself if you’re not utterly mechanically incompetent; I took off its four wee spring-loaded side-steps all by myself and replaced them with beefy-looking running boards over a year ago and they still haven’t fallen off yet. On the inside, the long-wheelbase ones in particular let you stow vast quantities of junk in them. This is a vehicle with almost no conventional cubby holes or storage bins to speak of; what it has instead is a ludicrous number of nooks and crannies, once you start looking for them, mostly behind and under its many, many seats.

  And you can fit a winch, the better to extricate yourself from awkward ditch-involving situations where even your low-ratio, differential-locked four-wheel drive and mud-plugging tyres won’t get you out of your sticky predicament. Or so I’m told. Personally, I’ve never used the winch for that, but it has come in handy for boat-pulling-out duties and once got our old Drascombe Lugger (that’s a boat, honest, not rhyming slang) onto the trailer and then the trailer out of the sea in circumstances probably no other vehicle but a tractor would have prevailed in.

  The only trouble with all the ironmongery up front is that you’re making an already deeply pedestrian-unfriendly vehicle even more lethal. Of all the things on the road you don’t want to walk out in front of, a tooled-up Defender must figure pretty near the top of the list. The first thing you’ll hit – no, let me correct that; the first thing that will hit you – is an industrial-looking winch capable of hauling five tonnes or so attached with extreme rigidity to a beefed-up bumper you could hang a lifeboat off which is in turn bolted to an exceptionally sturdy steel ladder chassis which is attached to everything else. There is no give there, anywhere.

  (‘Does this thing have crumple zones?’

  ‘Yes. They’re called other cars.’)

  In the Defender’s defence, all I can say is that, realising all this, you do tend to drive even more carefully, especially in towns, given the sort of mess you could make of other people or lesser vehicles if you hit one.

  The impressive view is useful here. Being so high up gives you a much better idea of what’s going on between and beyond parked cars and, on the open road, helps with planning overtaking manoeuvres. The Defender’s windscreen starts about where most cars’ roofs top out and from a Defender – especially one like ours, fitted with tall 750 series tyres which would hardly look out of place on a tractor – you even get to look down on Range Rover drivers. And walls. You and your passengers get to look over walls and hedges and fences; even a totally familiar route opens up the first time you drive it in one of these beasts.

  Other Defender advantages: they’re hard to lose. Take your average car into a crowded supermarket car park, forget exactly where you left it and you can spend ages searching for the thing. A Defender is different; as you push your trolley out of the supermarket’s front doors you can easily spot a Defender because it’s the object blocking out the sun in the near, middle or far distance, depending. And, talking about supermarket trolleys, Defenders laugh in the face of those savage despoilers of metallic-finish car bodywork. Honestly; you can still feel deeply proud of and even attached to the thing, but you just stop caring about dings, dents and scratches.

  In fact, a Defender doesn’t really look quite right until it’s got a few dents in its aluminium panels (Defenders look somehow distinctly embarrassed when they’re all clean and gleaming, too, and as for the alloy wheels you sometimes see them fitted with … dearie me). Plus the high floor – at hip-height on me, and I’m just over six feet – is perfect for loading heavy stuff, much more spine- and disc-friendly than a low car boot, however commodious.

  And, with a little experience, you can throw Defenders about to a surprising degree; they lean a lot and you’re kept very aware indeed that you’re driving something over two metres tall and only five feet wide, but, to some degree, they can be hustled. You can even get the tyres to squeal, though such larks do tend to alarm one’s passengers and as a result are very much not recommended. They are also very much not recommended because that squealing noise from the rubber bits generally means you are a frighteningly small speed increment away from executing a series of spectator-spectacular but incumbent-injurious rolls-cum-somersaults immediately prior to becoming an embedd
ed part, or parts, of the nearby scenery.

  Last advantage. This really only affects people in London for now, but if I read the rules correctly, you can drive a Land Rover like mine into the central charging zone of London without having to pay the congestion charge. I’m not saying you should, of course, but I think in theory you could.

  This is because a 110 County Station Wagon of this vintage has at least ten passenger seats. In theory it has eleven, believe it or not, but that includes the central seat in the front right beside the driver, where your passenger basically gets sexually assaulted every time an even-numbered gear is selected. Most people replace this effectively useless so-called seat with a cubby box for storing handy Landy stuff. As a result of this bizarre proliferation of seats and seat belts, the vehicle is effectively classed as a bus, and while it does mean that you face the added expense of an MOT from year one of ownership, not year three, this would easily be outweighed for Londoners by the benefits of even just a couple of weeks’ free driving into the city centre.

  Still a fine, bright, sunny day. Not warm, but mild, even on the water. The ferry shoulders its way through the knee-high waves; Gourock’s drawn-out southern limits draw away and I walk to the other side of the boat to watch Dunoon and Argyll come closer.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  It all started a few months ago, with my agent. The way things are supposed to when you’re a professional, after all. I was sitting at home in North Queensferry reading the paper and minding my own business on a cool October day when the phone rang.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Banksie. It’s Mic. I may have something for you.’

  My agent is called Mic Cheetham; she’s one of the best, kindest, nicest people I’ve ever met, but that’s in civilian mode; as an agent she has the great and invaluable merit of treating the authors she represents like her cubs. She’s the tigress, and you don’t get between her and them, or even think about doing anything unpleasant to them, unless you want to be professionally mauled. Mic is a very good friend but when she’s in full-on agent mode I’m just mainly glad that she’s on my side. What was Wellington’s remark about his troops? ‘I don’t know what effect they’ll have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me.’ Something like that.

  Anyway, Mic knows through years of experience and a deep tolerance of my congenital laziness that at least 95 per cent of the proposals that people contact her with concerning spiffing projects they want me to be part of she can either say No to without even asking me – though she’ll always mention it later – or promise to pass on but with the warning that there’s relatively little hope that I’m actually going to say Yes.

  And if Mic says she might have something for me, it must be a proposal worth thinking about. The last time she sounded like this I ended up driving a Formula One car round the Magny-Cours circuit in deepest France for Car magazine and having a great time (with reservations; I discovered I’m really a pretty rubbish track driver).

  ‘Uh-huh?’ I said, successfully containing my excitement.

  ‘How do you fancy being driven round every distillery in Scotland in a taxi and drinking lots of whisky? And then writing a book about it? For a not insubstantial sum. What d’you think? Eh? Hmm? Interested?’

  I was so excited I think I took my feet off the desk.

  I thought quickly (no, really). ‘Can I drive the taxi?’

  ‘Then you can’t drink.’

  ‘I’ll do the drinking later.’

  ‘Then I don’t see why not.’

  ‘Why a taxi anyway?’

  ‘I think they’re going for the incongruity factor; a black cab round the Highlands, puttering through the misty glens beneath the fearsome peaks, that sort of thing.’

  ‘These people are from London, aren’t they?’

  ‘Where else? Plus they thought you might share some witty repartee with a garrulous Glasgow cabbie.’

  ‘So they don’t know me; good, good …’

  ‘Anyway, Banksie, what do you think?’

  ‘Can we ditch the taxi? I mean, they’re fine in cities, but some of these distilleries are hundreds of miles away in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘What do you propose to do? Walk?’

  ‘No, I’ll just use my own wheels. I’ll drive myself. To drink. Ha!’

  ‘So you’d be alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then where’s the witty repartee?’

  ‘Maybe I can get some of my pals to come along and help with the driving and the tasting and the repartee side of things. Some of my friends are quite witty. Well, they’re always insulting me. That’s the same thing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course it is, my dear.’

  ‘… Hmm. And we are talking expenses included here, right? Petrol, hotels? Umm … More petrol?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you really think they’ll fall – they’ll agree to this?’

  You can hear somebody smile over the phone sometimes, just by the quality of their voice. ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘Brilliant! I’ll do it!’

  Which is why I find myself standing on the deck of this ferry, heading for sunny Dunoon, about to start the research phase of – gee! – my first non-fiction book. This next week on Islay should be fun if I don’t let the war get me down. And then there’s Jura, of course; I want to get across to Jura this time, to visit the distillery there and maybe get to see Orwell’s old house near the northern tip, and even – just possibly – finally see the Corryvrecken, the great tidal whirlpool between the north of Jura and the south of Scarba which I’ve heard about and seen some footage of (and mentioned in an earlier book or two) but always wanted to experience for myself. I mean; a whirlpool! One so ferocious you can hear it from miles away! How cool is that?

  From Dunoon along the coast road – past the peaceful-again Holy Loch where the old US Polaris subs had their floating dock and support ships – to the first of the Great Wee Roads we’re going to encounter in this book. Officially it’s called the B836 but I’m really bad at recalling road numbers so to me it’s filed in my head as the Great Wee Road To The Left Just Outside Dunoon Before You Get To The Younger’s Botanical Gardens That Takes You Towards The Kyles Of Bute, The Colintraive Ferry For Bute, Tighnabruich And The Ferry For Tarbert. Or something like that.

  At the head of Loch Striven I pass a field filled with huge dark brown wooden poles lying on the grass in the hazy sunlight. They look like oversize telephone poles, but must be due to carry power lines. The smell of creosote fills the Land Rover’s cabin. Sometime round about here I realise I’m going to miss the next ferry to Tarbert, where I’ve been hoping to drop in on some old friends – and thus complete a clean sweep of ex-editors this weekend – so I take a detour to Otter Ferry via a precipitous wee road curling over the hills towards Loch Fyne.

  Great Wee Roads: a digression.

  A Great Wee Road in my terminology just means a small road that isn’t a main route and which is fun to drive. Often it will be a short cut or at least an alternative route to the main road. It will virtually never be quicker than the main-road route but it will be a pleasure to drive, perhaps partly because it has less traffic, partly because it goes through lots of beautiful scenery and perhaps because it has lots of flowing curves, sudden dips, challenging hills and/or fast straights (though GWRs rarely have many of those). A GWR can be extremely slow – often way below the legal limit – and still be enormous fun, it can even be a single-track road, quite busy with traffic and so somewhat frustrating, and yet still be a hoot, and some roads only really become GWRs when it’s raining and you have to slow down.

  Anyway, that single-lane-with-passing-places route over to Otter Ferry – snaking up some deciduously wooded slopes towards the broad flat tops of the low hills and their close-ranked bristles of pines – is definitely a GWR.

  By the side of Loch Fyne I head north again and back down Glendaurel, finally having to press on once more as I’ve ever so slig
htly underestimated the time required – again – and so end up gunning the Defender up the long curving slopes towards the viewpoint looking out over the Kyles of Bute (this is one of the best views in Argyll, maybe one of the great views of Scotland; a vast, opening delta of ragged, joining lochs, flung arcs of islets and low-hilled island disappearing into the distance).

  This must be the first time – certainly the first time in decent weather – I haven’t stopped to take in that great sweep of view. The Land Rover tackles the hill fast in top gear, leaning mightily on the bends but still seat-of-the-pants secure; it feels good, but I’m annoyed at myself for not being able to spare the view more than a glance as I whiz by the car park at the summit.

  Getting on to the ferry from Portavadie to Tarbert is a bit easier than it used to be; last time I was here you had to reverse onto the boat, which must have been fun if you were towing a caravan. Back then, a few years ago now, my car was the only vehicle on the ferry, which felt kind of romantic somehow. I was on the way to meet an ex-girlfriend for lunch; a strictly platonic visit, but, still, there was a certain poignancy there.

  A year or so later the same ferry figured at the start of the first episode of the TV adaptation of The Crow Road, with young Joe McFadden playing the central character, Prentice McHoan, standing all alone on the deck, coming back to his family home for a funeral. I remember watching that first episode on a pre-transmission video and being very nervous – The Crow Road was the first book I’d ever had successfully adapted for the screen – and when I saw that first image, and made the connection with the ferry journey I’d taken a year or so earlier, I had one of those It’s-going-to-be-all-right Good Omen feelings that I’m not sure atheists like me are really allowed to have (but appreciate now and again all the same), and relaxed, deciding that probably this was going to be a good adaptation. Which, I’m happy to report, it was.