Raw Spirit (2 page)

After I’ve taken the scissors to our passports, I compose a brief covering letter, send an email explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing to the
Guardian
’s letters page and head into Inverkeithing to send the passports’ remains via registered mail to 10 Downing Street.

I come home and say goodbye to Ann; I’ll be away almost a week on Islay. After that, though I’m supposed to be making for the west coast, I head into central Edinburgh and drive around for a bit, trying to show off my posters along Queensferry Road, Charlotte Square and George Street before crossing Princes Street and going up the Mound past the temporary Scottish Parliament building to the castle and down the Royal Mile, then back to Princes Street.

In the city centre, on this bright, fresh, sunny day – singularly inappropriate for my mood, but there you go, that’s the pathetic fallacy for you – a few people notice the posters and some of them nod or give a thumbs up; the people who disapprove just tend to look away. But most people don’t look in the first place. Maybe I should have used coloured sheets of A4, or even just printed the words in something other than black, however big the font and however starkly pointed the gesture seemed at the time. Maybe I should have honked my damn horn.

I head west, out past the airport for the M8 through Glasgow, to cross the Clyde from Gourock to Dunoon.

Looking down at the trucks and cars sitting on the open vehicle deck on the ferry, I can’t even see the poster on the Land Rover’s sunroof; it’s one of those stippled black glass sunroofs that just hinges up a little rather than slides right back, and because of the fine black mesh effect on the glass the writing on the poster is only visible from directly above.

I stand in the sunlight, listening to the cries of the wheeling gulls as I drink a Styrofoam cup of tea and munch on a soggy, microwaved shell pie. I watch the depressingly decrepit
remains
of what used to be the modestly majestic Gourock Pier fall astern to be replaced by the arse-out aspect of the old tenements whose more respectable fronts face out into the main street on the far side. A glitter of windscreens in the seafront car park where a few guys stand with fishing rods, then the outdoor swimming pool and the rising slope of pleasant Victorian sandstone villas and early and late twentieth-century bungalows. I look around, at the canted streets, budding trees and whin-covered slopes, crowned by the folly on top of Tower Hill to the east, at the hills and mountains to the north and west, at the broad river, disappearing to a bright horizon in the south.

I used to live here, in Gourock. I used to work there, on the pier.

When I was young, from the age of about ten into my mid-teens, I’d lie awake at night in the summer in my bedroom high above the bay and the great curve of Gourock pier. Each fair night, in those warm months, I’d hear, through a cracked open window, the sound of a distant engine, puttering quietly away from the quayside a half-mile or so away. It came from one of the dozen or so ferries and steamers which always tied up there during the summer season.

It was the end of the Clyde’s golden age, when not that many people had cars and a lot of Glaswegians still took day trips and whole two-week holidays doon the watter, to resorts like Largs, Dunoon and Rothesay. I worked on the pier – catching mooring ropes and hoisting gangways, mostly – for a couple of summers while I was at University in the early seventies, along with a couple of full-time pier porters and one or two old school pals from Gourock High. In retrospect, I feel privileged to have been there, witnessing the end of an era. We caught the ropes off the
Waverley
– the world’s last seagoing paddle steamer, and still to be found thudding and splashing its way round the seaside resorts of Britain during the summer – and we watched the newfangled hovercraft come roaring up the beach near the Pilots’ Station at the downstream end of the pier, spitting stones from under its skirts like bullets and generally making a nuisance of itself. As I say, the
Waverley
’s still hanging on in there, but the hovercraft never really caught on; some eras come and go almost before you realise they’ve started.

Now all the great steamers are gone and just the car ferries survive; there are a few small boats running across the Clyde to Helensburgh and Kilcreggan, and the odd booze cruise – sometimes on the
Waverley
if it’s on the Clyde – to somewhere further afield, but that’s your lot, and many of the old piers are crumbling away. Even Gourock pier, home to the Dunoon ferries, is mostly a ruin. The trains stop outside, further down the platforms instead of running on into the long galleried curve of the serried glass roof, most of which has been demolished, and even the pier’s surface has disappeared once you go beyond the car ferry’s ro-ro ramp; all that’s left are the concrete foundations which used to support the wood and tarmac above.

It all looks a bit like somebody’s mouth just after they’ve had most of their teeth removed. I think if you’d never seen the place before you’d find it ugly just on first principles, but for somebody like me, remembering how handsome it used to look, it’s saddening too.

I hear there are plans to redevelop the whole seafront in Gourock and – always providing it’s not just the usual excuse for developers to cram the maximum number of tiny flats into the one space with minimal facilities – it can’t happen soon enough.

Public space/private space. I cheer myself up, partially, by gazing at the Defender.

The Land Rover: a paean
.

Ah, the Land Rover. It is, to give its full title, a Land Rover Defender 110 County Station Wagon Td5. It’s the particularly agricultural-looking model of the Land Rover stable, the ugly one in a family not noted for being overburdened with outrageously good looks in the first place. It has straight up-and-down sides and flat-plane glass all round (except for the wee
curved
windows set into the edge of the roof which are for looking up at mountains, allegedly). Engine sounds like a bucket of bolts in a tumble drier.

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 embedded part, or parts, of the nearby scenery.