Raw Spirit: In Search of the Perfect Dram

  Toby had a party in his suite, a fairly palatial set of rooms on the fourth floor of the Metropole Hotel, facing the beach and the sea. Not that it was really a party to Toby, not technically. It was just ‘a drink for a few friends, dear boy/dear girl’. After about six hours, when the few friends numbered in the treble figures and the bar in the sitting room had been restocked three or four times – and I mean a bar, here, not a minibar; each refill required a porter with one of those vertically stacked hand-barrows, fully loaded – Toby almost admitted that it was really a party, but then insisted that – a few freeloaders he didn’t recognise apart – this was still just a drink for a few friends. The few drinks continued. I think it’s probably the best party I’ve ever been to.

  Dawn. Most people had gone. Maybe a dozen were left, amongst them myself and Rog Peyton and Dave Holmes of Andromeda, Birmingham’s main SF bookshop. The three of us were standing on the balcony of Toby’s bedroom, talking about whatever, when my attention was drawn by a nearby balcony; that of Toby’s sitting room. More specifically, my attention was drawn by the relatively short distance between the balcony we were standing on and the balcony of Toby’s sitting room.

  ‘Dave, hold this, would you?’ I handed Dave Holmes my glass.

  Now. Especially while I lived in London, I used to enjoy the very much non-Olympic sport of Drunken Urban Climbing. For a while I assumed I’d invented this recreation, but on reflection I’m sure I wasn’t the first to partake of its heady, dangerous mysteries, foremost amongst which, of course, is how anybody can ever get so drunk without actually being unconscious or dead that they think this might be a good idea in the first place. I’d get drunk and climb things; city things, like buildings. Well, bits of buildings; I’m not claiming I used to shin up Centre Point or scale the Houses of Parliament or anything.

  Reversion-to-childhood thing: I was always climbing trees and scrambling up rocks when I was young, and usually going a bit further on and up than my pals. This was not so much the result of a spirit of competition as the consequence of possessing an oh, shit! reaction that kicked in after most other people’s had. I was always fairly tall and skinny and I convinced myself that because my mum had been a professional ice skater I must have inherited a brilliant sense of balance and this gave me an edge.

  Even so, climbing, drunk or sober, should never have held this attraction for me; it nearly killed me when I was a child. The experience ought to have traumatised me out of such larks and left me with a profound fear of heights.

  North Queensferry is sited on a stubby little peninsula sticking out from the south coast of Fife; behind the village is/are the Ferry Hill/Ferry Hills (depends which map you consult). When they were building the rail line to link up with the Forth Bridge back in 1890 the engineers decided to put a cutting through the raised ground, but the rock proved unworkably friable; soft sandstone with scaly boulders of only slightly harder sandstone embedded in it, and it kept falling into the cutting. They dug down about 60 feet but after the umpteenth rock slide gave up and built a tunnel underneath instead, taking the same line as the cutting, which thereafter just sat there, this weird, rock-strewn, overgrown canyon a quarter of a mile long through the Ferry Hill(s).

  One day, back when I was seven or eight, I was climbing up the west side of the cutting with some of my pals; almost at the top, I grabbed this big boulder sticking out of the cliff face above me and started to pull myself up. The boulder came out of the cliff like a rotten tooth and both the boulder and I started to fall towards the floor of the cutting, about 50 feet below.

  I let go of the boulder; it crashed into the rocks beneath. I was caught by a whin bush growing out of a narrow ledge a few feet below where I’d started falling. I got very scratched and there may have been a degree of whimpering involved. My pals formed a human chain and hauled me to safety and by the time I got home my legs had pretty much stopped shaking (naturally, being a considerate little lad and not wanting to upset anybody, I delayed telling my parents what had happened, waiting a decade and a half or so). I submit that any sensible kid would have learned a lesson from that. Patently, I didn’t.

  When I left my friend Dave McCartney’s flat in Belsize Road, where I’d crashed for a few months, and found my own place in London – living first in a flat in Islington Park Street and later with Ann on Graham Road – my favourite route for handy climbing opportunities was along the section of the Grand Union Canal east of the Angel. It was a more interesting way home than the adjoining roads, and if you suddenly realised you needed a pee, well …

  I think the Drunken Urban Climbing thing all started when there was some work being done under a bridge and the towpath had been closed off with a wall of wooden boards; I was annoyed that my route was blocked, but then just went hand-over-hand along the top of the boards, legs dangling over the canal, until I got to the far end and resumed my walk. Another time I climbed over a wall into a factory yard and up this piece of industrial paraphernalia that looked like something out of an oil refinery and smelled like a tannery; it was about six or seven metres tall and had some sort of series of stepped, shallow open tanks at the top into one of which I inadvertently put a foot while standing up to get a better view. The boot concerned fell apart over the course of the following week and that sock was never quite the same again, but my foot was all right.

  I had, perhaps foolishly, confessed this eccentric but relatively harmless pastime to Ann, who proceeded to persuade me – with a degree of forthrightness I had not previously credited her with – that Drunken Urban Climbing was, basically, unbelievably stupid. When I was sober I realised this myself, of course. Anyway, I made a promise to her: no more climbing.

  And I kept my promise, I’m proud to say, until, standing on that balcony overlooking the pebbly beach of Brighton as the horizon went from black to grey and that clear summer’s night becoming morning, I spotted a loophole.

  While Dave Holmes held my drink, I swung my legs over the side of the wrought-iron balcony, reached across for a handhold or two and made the easy traverse to the balcony outside Toby’s sitting room. A traverse, you see? Completely horizontal movement. No height gained at all. And therefore, by definition, not climbing! Promise unbroken; huzzah!

  Dave was still looking for a place to put down both the drinks he now held, and Rog Peyton had, after staring open-mouthed, not entirely believing what he was seeing, made a grab to stop me, but I was already gone, holding onto the outside of the railing on the other balcony and looking in at the sitting room where I could see John Jarrold sitting on a couch talking with a young lady. The couch was positioned at about 45 degrees to the opened balcony doors, and this is where the slightly stupid bit comes in. I said, ‘Hey there, Mr Jarrold,’ and waved.

  When I had John’s attention I switched hands and waved with my other hand, then did this again, each time leaving a short interval when I had both hands off the railing and was, effectively – feet not quite balanced on the outside edge of the balcony’s stonework – starting to fall. Before I caught myself and waved. Wave, switch (start to fall backwards), grasp railing and wave; wave, switch (start to fall backwards), grasp railing and wave; I did this a few times before John, staring at me, worked out what was wrong with the picture he was looking at (meanwhile Rog and Dave H had given up shouting at me and were stumbling through from the bedroom to the sitting room). When John realised that he could see the railings between him and me, he jumped up and ran for the balcony. Realising the fun was over, I’d put both hands on the rails and started to swing a leg over, but he more or less pulled me to safety anyway.

  All good clean fun, really, though I did apologise to all concerned if I’d upset anybody in any way. And there it might have ended, but for the fact that by a hideous coincidence, almost at the same time as I was doing my traverse, a robbery was taking place next door in an adjoining suite, one of those being used by the Con administration. Stuff was nicked, the thief was seen briefly – thankfully the clean-shaven swine loo
ked nothing like me, or that might really have confused matters – the police were called, and I thought I’d better wait and mention to the cop – who appeared to be about twelve – that I’d been sort-of-climbing on the face of the hotel at the same time as the robbery had taken place. Witnesses vouched for me not having taken a quick detour to any further-away balconies, having a big bag with Swag written on it or wearing a stripy jumper and a black eye mask, and so it went no further.

  I went to bed, creeping in beside Ann without disturbing her. Plenty of time later in the morning, I thought, for her to hear all the grisly details, roll her eyes and add a cast-iron sub-clause to the no-climbing agreement covering so-called traverses involving what I believe climbers airily term ‘exposure’.

  I got up before noon (Ann snoozed on), went for a breakfast Bloody Mary, as one does on such occasions, and the first person I met as I turned away from the bar looked surprised and asked, ‘Oh! They let you out on bail, did they?’

  A lesser man might have spluttered his drink. Having more respect for a healthy breakfast, I managed to swallow quickly before saying, ‘What?’

  I discovered over the next half hour or so just how quickly rumours mutate and propagate. Only about six or seven hours had passed since the whole sordid balcony episode, and yet already it was common knowledge around the Con that, a) I was an international jewel thief and, b) I’d been seen by various extremely emphatic witnesses who swore blind they’d seen me, dressed in a Spider Man outfit, climbing the hotel from the ground up to the fourth floor … Or, c) I’d been clearly observed – by several people of unimpeachable trustworthiness – dressed in distinctive SAS black coveralls abseiling down from the roof of the hotel down to the offending balcony.

  It wouldn’t have mattered quite so much, but a lot of Americans were leaving the Con for home that day and so took this travesty of the truth back with them. And then Mike Harrison – heroic writer and rock climber – gave me a climbing lesson on one of the low walls overlooking the pavement outside the bar (there were a lot of handholds on the carved stone foliage decorating the plinths). I jumped off from about two feet up and landed awkwardly, doing something painful to my instep; limped the rest of the Con. From two feet up! After my death-defying fourth-floor antics! I ask you!

  The ignominy.

  Time for a little stock-taking, as we head back home from Islay. It strikes me there are different ways to get to know a country, or any complicated area or space. I feel I know the landscape of Scotland fairly well; I’ve driven over most of it, flown over a lot of it, walked various bits of it, sailed round and to and from various other areas, stayed in all its cities and many of its towns, climbed a few of its mountains, boated on a couple of its rivers and canoed a bit. I’m moderately well up on its history, though I could, probably should, know a lot more. I think I have a reasonable grasp of the differences between the various regions of Scotland, the variety of attitudes and accents you encounter, shading gradually from one to another, as you travel from one part to another. I’ve talked to neds and nobles, got sense and gibberish out of each and I’ve tried, admittedly not with any great degree of intensity, to keep up with Scottish cultural life.

  But there’s always more. And there’s always different. I guess a dedicated mountaineer, a Munro bagger, could have the same mixture of Scottish General Knowledge I’ve just confessed to above, but have a radically different idea of what Scotland is, what it represents, just because of their sport; they’d think of peaks unclimbed and climbed and the vivid memories of specific routes and peaks; their image of Scotland’s geography would be biased towards the West, the centre and North-West (indeed its physical geography would matter more than most other types of geography). I imagine a golfer has a different view entirely, with their internal map of the land’s most important areas being almost an opposite of the mountaineer’s, skewed to the South, the East and North-East. A union organiser might have a mental chart that differed radically again, prioritising the central industrial belt, or industry-specific sites like ports or electronics factories. Every job, every field of academic study, every interest, gives people a biased internally fabricated model of the country they inhabit, a weighting of meaning that will differ subtly from every other person’s and yet bear similarities of layout to those they share those jobs, pastimes or hobbies with.

  So whisky. More to the point, the making of it. The marketing of Scotch is everywhere and its distribution worldwide, but its production is legally limited to Scotland, its focus concentrated on this one relatively small country, and, within that small country, on barely a hundred generally modest, usually out-of-the-way sites many of which employ only a dozen or so people.

  Of course, there’s whiskey from Ireland, bourbon from the States and Japanese whisky which is Scotch-in-all-but-name and they’re fine drinks in their own terms (and, as with individual whiskies, some are fine in absolute terms), but this is a book about Scotch, about Scots, about Scotland, and getting to know about the making of whisky, its history, its relation to the land and what it means to people both here and abroad is a way of getting to know more about the country where it’s made and the people who make it.

  And there’s a further quest involved here, too, besides this search for the perfect dram.

  I’ve never tasted it, never been offered it, never really heard anything about it, but I’m convinced that somebody, somewhere, must be making illegal whisky; whisky the way it used to be made, before it became first outlawed and then legalised, before it became taxed, before it became (and this is very much a relative term, given the small scale and considerable art involved in the process) industrialised. There has to be a secret still out there somewhere; probably there are many, surely there have to be several. I’d like to see a still in action but I’d settle for a taste of the product (I mean, providing it isn’t likely to blind me or anything). I’d like to talk to the people involved, if I can convince them I’m not going to expose them or report them to Customs and Excise, but it’s that taste I’m particularly interested in, because it’ll be a taste, to some degree, of the past, a link to the place where the whisky we know now came from.

  Apart from anything else, I’d like to know why there’s so little illegal whisky in Scotland. In particular, why is it so uncommon compared to its Irish equivalent, poteen? Go to Ireland for long enough – blimey, stay in Scotland for long enough – and you’ll be offered poteen sooner or later, by somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody … But in over 30 years of sometimes casual, often determined and occasionally assiduous drinking in pretty much every cranny and indeed neuk of Scotland, I can’t recall ever being offered hooch which was actually made in the place, and none of my friends have either. This strikes me as odd. Given the nature of some of my friends, it’s practically preposterous.

  I’m almost tempted to believe that the more likely explanation is that I’ve been offered whiskeen – or whatever it might be called – dozens of times and accepted it fulsomely on each occasion, only to, for some reason, forget all about it by the following morning, though this is of course a patently absurd suggestion and I’m mildly surprised I’ve even thought of it. Come to think of it, just ignore it. Actually, I’ll probably take this bit out of the first draft. In fact, I know: I’ll remove it tomorrow morning when I look back at what I wrote the night before.

  Gosh, this ‘research’ stuff is fascinating. Now I know, from reading other books about whisky, that Scotch poteen is called peatreek.

  Peatreek. It’s an old word, and has already fallen almost completely out of use, but that is the technical term for what I’m looking for. Actually, as a word, I quite like it. In common with a lot of writers and not a few readers, I kind of collect words, and peatreek seems like a good one to have in the collection.

  But no sign of the stuff itself. Not so far, anyway. I’ve made a few inquiries and dropped a few hints, but to date nobody has come up with anything. I didn’t really think there’d be too much chance of i
llegal distilling on Islay just because there’s so much of the legal variety – you’d think that anybody with those sorts of skills could make a good, worry-free living working on the right side of the law – and Islay always feels quite civilised compared to some bits of Scotland, the bits I usually associate with whisky production. It really does feel like it’s part of Scotland’s central belt in places, certainly compared to the other Inner Hebridean islands, let alone the Outer Hebrides.

  But then maybe if you’re a distiller in your day job and you find the whole process technically fascinating – and don’t just want to get away from it of an evening and put your feet up in front of the telly – you would try setting up a portable still somewhere in the wilds just to see if it can be done, and whether your skills translate to a smaller scale. After all, Islay is quite rugged in places, with its own relative remotenesses. I took a solitary drive out to the Oa, the nearly circular peninsula sticking out like a growth from Islay’s south-east corner, pointing towards Ireland, and it got really rugged and interesting down towards that fabulously fractured coast; all sea stacks, cliffs, ragged gullies and caves fronting the greyly shining sea and fringed by rocks covered with yellowing foam blown off the waves. You could hide a still on the Oa no problem. Goodness knows, the extravagantly cratered single-track road would be enough to put off any Excise man concerned about the springs and shocks on his government-issue car.

  And though this is the fourth time I’ve been to this not exactly vast island, there are still a few roads I haven’t driven and lots of trackless hills and lochs scattered about which I’ve been nowhere near. These hills are walked on, and worked on by shepherds, foresters, estate workers and game keepers, but even so …

  Whatever, if there is anything going on, nobody – probably very wisely – is talking about it, certainly not to a daft bumptious distillery-bagging scribbler from Fife. Book or not, research or not, I’m just a tourist here, but it’s a good place to be a tourist.