by Iain Banks
Malt whisky is expensive. It’s expensive because it’s made in small batches by skilled people and has to sit for years and years and years doing nothing except taking up warehouse space, evaporating slowly and getting tastier. It will not get you any more drunk than a much cheaper similar-strength blend, so what you’re paying the extra for is the taste, and that taste’s going to be completely overpowered by the sugary fizz you’re adding. If, at the end of all this, somebody still wants to drink their malt with ice and soda, well, that’s their choice, and every measure and every bottle sold is helping to keep the industry going, people employed and a way of life thriving, no matter.
The way I was taught to take whisky is first to use your eyes to check out the colour. Then swirl the stuff around the glass to see how thick or thin it is, observing its legs (the little rivulets that run down the side of the glass after you’ve swirled it). Next have a good sniff, open mouthed or whatever. Then take a sip completely neat. How much you sip can depend on how strong the whisky is – cask strength can be very strong, over 100 proof, and hence a bit nippy, straight. In effect your own saliva will dilute the whisky, so the stronger the stuff, the smaller the sip.
According to taste, mix with water. Adding the same again is a standard measure, though a lot of people think this is exactly double what’s ideal. In any event, some cask-strengths in particular might need quite a lot of watering down. Then just drink. And savour, if you will; roll the stuff around in your mouth, feel it there and in your throat when you swallow. Don’t knock back in a single gulp unless you’re at an airport and they’ve got to the stage of calling you by name and threatening to close the flight, or unless you have just been told you’ve won the lottery, or are going to become a father (obviously you won’t be celebrating being told you’re going to be a mother. Not with alcohol, anyway. Have a fag instead).
Les and I met in Greenock High School. At the time I was writing these truly awful stories about a character called Dahommey Breshnev (sic, and, yet again, sic). These were bizarre, poor and just plain bad for lots of reasons but principally because I was really into puns at the time and was trying to squeeze as many puns into each story as I could. The stories became pun-driven, pun-led; I made the stories up as I went along and at every junction of the tale, whenever there was a choice about what was going to happen next, I invariably went for the route that seemed to promise the highest number of puns.
* * *
And that’s one of the good ones.
Here’s an example of those puns: one of the characters in a later Dahommey Breshnev story was called Toss Macabre.
Told you.
As the stories went on I tried to compress more and more puns into each one, and it became a matter of authorial honour to have a greater concentration of puns in the story I was working on than I’d achieved in the one before. I’d count all the words in each story, then count all the puns, divide one by the other and so arrive at the story’s pun-to-word ratio. This quickly became by far the most important attribute the stories possessed (it was easy to measure, it was precise, it felt almost scientific … sometimes I think I might have made a really average bureaucrat). Characterisation, plotting, moral themes, plausibility? These were just words.
And not even very good words, either, by this way of thinking; ‘plotting’ might have a punning link to gardening or something, but ‘characterisation’ is just a dead loss; ditto ‘moral’, though there might be a way to separate the ‘m’ in ‘moral’ from the rest of the word and so … No, too contrived even for me. ‘Themes’ could stretch to a lame lisp-oriented pun about seams … ‘Plausibility’? No, just useless.
(This weakness for puns and juvenile wordplay is something that I am not quite totally over even now, three decades later; there was, in the first draft of Chapter Three in this book, in the sub-section ‘Whisky; the how-to bit.’ the unfortunate sentence at the end of a paragraph, ‘Still, waste not wort not.’ Thank goodness I took it out.)
I am probably not as ashamed as I ought to be that I can still remember how immensely proud I was when – in Dahommey’s final short story, The Apparently Interminable Adventures of – I got the pun-to-word ratio down to below one in ten.
Deeply sad. I kind of knew it at the time, too, but I didn’t care. It was fun.
All I can say in my own defence is that at least I was never stupid enough to imagine for a nanosecond that any of this stuff would impress girls. I enjoyed doing this sort of thing for its own sake, and if a few of my male pals thought them worth a groan or two – for a groan is about as generous and positive a reaction to a pun as you’re likely to get – then that was okay too, though still not the reason I was actually doing any of this.
Even so, in a vain and misguided attempt to get more people to read these appalling pieces of nonsense, I’d started illustrating them with collages constructed from photos ripped out of the Observer magazine. These were and are by far the best things in the little school-book-based pamphlets that each of the stories appeared in. Some of the collages are almost inventive, and a few arguably witty.
Possibly because of my fiendish wordplaying, more likely because of rude pictures featuring swimwear models, Les asked to see some of my work one day. Unaccountably disinclined to quickly return it and back away smiling reassuringly while not making any sudden movements – and vowing never to acknowledge my existence ever again – Les instead appeared to think they were actually worth looking at, if not worth reading, obviously. I was flattered in the extreme and we became friends.
The day after the successful boat-putting-in, we say goodbye to Eilidh, who is off to Iceland on a school trip. (Actually I said goodbye the night before because she was getting the bus from the school at 6 a.m. or something awful like that and after beer, wine and whisky, even taken in relatively modest quantities, six in the morning seemed a bit beyond the call of duty for groggy farewells).
Les and Aileen are such brilliant hosts, and so used to putting up their many friends, they keep a visitors’ book. This is generally just an excuse for drunken ramblings, outright lies, boasts about pool, golf, card and other scores, hopeless attempts at contemporary humour and unspecified incomprehensible gibberish, interspersed, very occasionally, with genuine appreciations for the fine hospitality received (usually from people who don’t stay there very often and so don’t understand that the visitors’ book is really supposed to be for drunken ramblings, outright lies, etc.).
Given that writing is my profession, it’s a never-ending source of worry for me that my contributions to this ongoing round-robin work are rarely amongst the funniest, and true to form I do my cause no good on this occasion, leaving a comment about Eilidh going to Iceland and failing to come back with the twelve-pack of frozen beefburgers I’d requested. In reality I ask her to bring back a handful of black volcanic sand, and, bless her, a week later, she does.
Sunday we spend down the loch in the boat under the still unseasonable warmth of a cloudless sky, exploring some of the land down by Glenaladale then heading for the far side of the loch and threading the boat between some of the tiny islands just off the south-east shore, reconnoitring at a putter then belting through at full speed, just for the hell of it. I could tell you exactly where it was but it’s four hard-to-pronounce Gaelic words in a row and frankly it’s in none of our interests for me even to try. At Glenaladale, despite the fact I am 49 and Les very nearly is – Les rarely allows an opportunity to pass when he can remind me I am a whole three months older than he is – we spend a significant amount of time and effort skipping stones, trying to hit large stones with small ones while the former are in flight, throwing stones at logs, using thin or circular stones – spun – in our attempts to produce duck’s farts, and sweatily heaving the largest rocks we can manage up to the tops of small cliffs so we can throw them into the water and so produce Really Big Splashes.
(Look, growing up is about this sort of stuff no longer being the only way you’re allowed to have fun, no
t about having to give it up altogether.)
6: WhiskyLandWorldVille!
MONDAY. WE’RE BOUND for Speyside, booked into a hotel just outside the village of Dulnain, near Grantown-on-Spey. Aileen takes first go at driving the M5.
Aileen is Les’s younger and fitter wife. We know this because it was reported as such in the Lochaber News following the incident when the boat drifted off from one of the sand beaches far down on the south-west shore of the loch and Les had to swim after it (long story).
Aileen’s a popular PE teacher who seems very happy in her job but she should, I’m convinced, have been an agent. Or some sort of negotiator. I’ve never met anybody better at striking a bargain, making a deal, haggling for a discount – or getting various bits of kit thrown in for free – who wasn’t a professional. And I’ve met a few professionals who lacked her natural gift. Aileen’s skills in this area are, amongst those who know her, legendary. No matter how hard-nosed a sales person might think they are, Aileen will find a way round them. She’s negotiated deals where I would never have imagined it was remotely possible, like the time when she and Eilidh were in London and Aileen somehow persuaded the people who ran the open-top bus and river-boat trips that they should have a reduced rate for people doing both. Housewife from the sticks gets one over on cynical big bad city tourist operation … nope, still beggars belief.
One of her more remarkable deals was, fittingly enough, with the Ben Nevis distillery, just outside Fort William, when she was trying to attract sponsorship for the Glenfinnan Volleyball Team. A friendly chat with the very pleasant and helpful people at the distillery and she walked out with a crate of whisky for the team, plus a load of miniatures. The distillery didn’t even want its names on the team T-shirts or anything; they were happy with a mention in the programme.
In 1995, on a very hot, still, magnificently sunny day, a bunch of us were running the ice-cream tent at the Glenfinnan Games. I’m implying that we all helped out; in fact, I’m ashamed to admit, the reality was that – without us really intending this to happen, honest – the women folk ended up doing the actual serving and taking the money while we guys – and supposedly New Men – stayed at the back of the tent in the shade, sitting on the coolboxes, fanning ourselves with games programmes and guzzling the cold beers which had somehow found their way into the coolboxes along with the more commercially relevant tubs of ice cream.
The ’95 games were a big occasion because they were marking the 250th anniversary of the raising of the standard at Glenfinnan at the beginning of the 1745 rebellion (the one that started in Glenfinnan, went by way of Derby and was finished on a bleak bit of moorland outside Inverness called Culloden). Usually the Glenfinnan Games attract under a thousand entrants and spectators – which is still not bad for a wee village – but in ’95 there were getting on for ten thousand people swarming over the place: loads of locals, myriads of generally slightly bemused tourists, dozens of history junkies and far-flung nationalists who’d jetted in from all over the world for the event, bunches of TV, radio and press people – thanks to the sun, the setting and the crowds, the photographs were front-page splashes in various Scottish newspapers the following day – and an awful lot of those very serious-looking guys who dress up in authentically bulky and brownly dour highland dress, carry formidable-looking claymores, swords and nail-studded shields and who, as a rule, sport Extreme Beards. Beards of such rampant abundance they look entirely capable of concealing within their tangled topography an entire redcoat-murdering ambush party of tooled-up Highlanders.
On games day ’95 these guys mostly had very red faces, partly due to sunburn (and possibly partly due to the presence of so many unashamedly English tourists – I don’t know) and partly due to the fact that those heavy, dark, historically authentic plaids – which I’m sure really are what my ancestors used to wear, but which I confess always remind me of giant brown nappies – are fine for keeping you warm in the teeth of a swirling Highland downpour of severe lashingness, but are not really optimum apparel for days when the sunlight is beating down like a golden sledgehammer and the tarmac is melting on the roads. They were, accordingly, some of our best customers at the ice-cream tent, which was, by a coincidence, right next to the Drambuie marquee.
Drambuie’s link with the event was more than just gratuitous; after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden, Prince Charlie escaped back to Paris via Skye with the help of Flora MacDonald. He died in Rome, 40 years later, after living in Paris and Florence, mostly, and after having made two or three secret visits to London in the 1750s. There were mistresses and wives and he never entirely gave up hoping he might really become Charles the Third of Great Britain; died with his boots off. Not such a bad life, considering. Certainly more agreeable than being torn to bits by grapeshot and musket-fire during the battle itself, or being butchered afterwards while lying wounded, or trying to run away.
Anyway, while on Skye he stayed with the MacKinnon family and drank Drambuie, which, as Walter Schobert points out in his exhaustive The Whisk(e)y Treasury, very likely represents the way whisky used to be drunk back then, at least amongst the toffs; that is as a fine malt mixed with honey and herbs. There seems to be some dispute over whether Prince Charlie already had the recipe and gave it to the MacKinnons as a thank you, or they already had the recipe and just – eventually – made canny use of the romantic connection. I prefer the latter, but in any event Drambuie probably had more right to be there at the 250th anniversary bash than anybody else.
Come to think of it, I have my own link with Drambuie; that cancelled-order 911 we had with the orange/terracotta interior had allegedly been ordered by a director of the Drambuie company (hence the, umm, remarkable colour, maybe).
Aileen, who, I think it would be fair to say, has something of a sweet tooth, set up a very welcome and mutually beneficial deal with the girls who were serving in the by now sweltering Drambuie tent; some of our ice cream for some of their liqueur. We chaps particularly appreciated this as we’d just run out of beer.
Like I say; she’d have made a great agent.
We turn left at the Ben Nevis distillery with its highly photogenic Highland cattle. I can remember when Highland cattle – also known as hairy coos – were relatively rare sights unless you were deep in the Highlands or way out in the islands. Now they seem to be everywhere. Apparently a lot of places keep them just because they look so great – they are, effectively, pets – and in some cases because they get tourists to stop to take photographs or video (and so perhaps thereafter take in the attraction that has positioned them so cunningly). If this is cynical, well, it’s a relatively innocuous form of cynicism. And Highland cattle just do look wonderful.
As a piece of architecture, Ben Nevis distillery is nothing special; a bit overly industrial, though the lines are softened by lots of barrels in the grounds. Established by the very tall ‘Long John’ MacDonald back in 1825, it was closed for five years in the late nineteen-eighties before being rescued and reopened by the the Japanese Nikka firm (Japanese whisky really falls outside the remit of this book, but I think it’s briefly worth making the point that Japanese whisky can be very good indeed, and that Japanese firms which have taken over or bought into the Scottish whisky business have generally treated the industry, the people and the product itself with more respect than a lot of our home-grown entrepreneurs). Hopefully with an experienced firm like Nikka behind it, Ben Nevis will continue to flourish and develop; the 10-year-old I bought is a enjoyably big, chewy thing, like eating a nut-sprinkled chocolate liqueur.
Past the entrance to Inverlochy. The old Inverlochy castle, nearer the town, is that rarity among Scottish castles; a moated one – or in Inverlochy’s case a once-moated one, as the moat is just a shallow depression on the castle’s three landward sides, the fourth facing the river Lochy. Off the top of our heads, as we’re taking a look round the impressive but only recently de-scaffolded ruins, Les and I can only think of two other moated castles in Scotland: Rothesay and Cae
rlaverock. Old Inverlochy was off-limits because of safety and remedial work for so long that we’d both kind of forgotten about it, but now it’s open to the public again and it’s a large and impressive site; worth seeing.
The newer Inverlochy Castle, a little further out of town, is a very grand country house hotel indeed. It doesn’t actually have that many rooms but that’s because they’ve wisely kept the apartments pretty much as they were when the place was a private house; big. Ann and I once stayed in a room about the size of a tennis court. You had to stand up and take a good look round – or shout – to determine whether you were alone in there or not. We’ve stayed at Inverlochy a few times; once with Mum and Dad and on a couple of occasions with the McFarlanes. Hearing that the place is occasionally frequented by some very famous film stars, Les and I always make a point of playing a frame or two of snooker, just in case we bump into Sean and Clint and get to thrash them in a doubles game, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Usually when the five of us have stayed there we’ve had a private dining room. No way is this because we are noisy and might upset the other, more respectable guests.
Our most recent stay at Inverlochy was last year, when Bentley, for some bizarre reason, suddenly took it into their heads to let me have one of their extremely expensive motor cars for a couple of days. Even the invitation to drive the thing was classy; a framed piece of art made up to look like the cover of one of my books (back in the black-and-white days), with the word ‘Bentlicity’ emblazoned on it. How could I refuse?
A shiny silver-grey Continental T was duly delivered to our house and Ann and I immediately zapped off to Inverlochy before Bentley could change their minds, inviting Les, Aileen and Eilidh to be our guests.