Raw Spirit (31 page)

Clynelish has a wide, open view towards the sea. The new buildings are somewhere between inelegant and plain ugly, but it’s a cared-for-looking sort of place with well-tended
grounds
– dotted with wildly flowering cherry trees at this time of year.

It’s really two distilleries. The old Clynelish distillery was renamed Brora when the new plant was completed in 1968 and it produced one of the great lost giants of the world of single malts; a peatily intense beauty combining some of the best characteristics of a Highland and an Island whisky. Brora was shut down in 1983 and the whisky is becoming harder to find these days. I found a Rare Malts 24-year-old from 1977 at the distillery shop, clocking in at a fairly throat-catching 56.1 abv. It truly is a cracker; seaweedy, smoky, redolent of docksides thick with coiled, tarry rope and containing a spice rack full of hot, intense flavours. It would not be technically impossible to start production again at Brora, but it appears it’s unlikely. A shame.

Clynelish itself, the product of the modern distillery and its very large stills, is certainly nothing to be ashamed of; the 14-year-old – which seems to be pretty much the standard age for this whisky to be bottled at – is a similarly briny, tarry, almost oily dram, also strong on pepper and mustard flavours though much less peaty compared to Brora and anyway somehow greener smelling and tasting; certainly sufficiently distinct from its mothballed neighbour for Diageo to be able to market both if they wanted to and thought the demand might be there.

The A9 tends to get better the further north it heads. Beyond Brora is some wonderful, free-feeling road set in extravagantly open, wide-screen scenery; even if you weren’t on a probably doomed quest for some unspeakably supreme whisky, you’d still have the exhilarating feeling – twisting along this rising, rushing braid of tarmac – of whirling towards the end of the world. To the left, north and west, are the hills and lone, distant mountains, the few forests and many moors. The sea is always there to the right, glittering, studded in the distance with rigs and production platforms, its ever-changing surface textured and grained with the competing influences of tide and wind, fraying to surf at the stony margins of the winding hem of coast. The single-line rail route from Inverness to Thurso and
Wick
twines beside the road as far as Helmsdale, usually between the road and the coast, often coming close enough for trains to shield passing cars from spray when the weather’s foul and the waves break mountainously on the rocks and shingle beyond.

Entirely the worst weather for this journey, however, is when the fog rolls in. You have to go slow, you can hardly overtake, and worst of all there’s not even any scenery to look at to compensate. So far over the years we’ve been very lucky, never encountering more than patchy mist, and today it’s just fabulous; bright bright bright with a few scattered fluffy clouds. The M5 eats miles on a road like this; even staying at licence-friendly speeds there’s an easy rhythm to the road the car slots into like a Scalextric racer, barely slowing from such modest speeds for bends, and dispatching the occasional instances of slower traffic with ease. Part of the fun of a truly good drive in a fast car on real-life roads is not going too fast; the faster you go the more relatively slower stuff you have to overtake, and at a certain ellative point overtaking can stop being fun and just become a chore.

The driver’s own abilities being taken as some sort of constant, the sweet spot on a non-trivial drive is finding the right speed for the mixture of variables involved: legality and safety, the abilities of the car, the physicalities of the road, the weather and light, and the balance of similarly directioned and oncoming traffic. The drive to Wick feels like a good ‘un and my passenger seems happy, which is generally the single most important and telling thing to get right when you’re not driving alone.

We stop at the Pentland Arms Hotel in Lybster. Another definite find. Lunch at Jo’s Kitchen there more than makes up for any breakfast deficit; I go for a baked potato and salad with the firm intention of leaving plenty of room for whatever might be on the Bunchrew’s menu tonight but the spud that arrives is the size of a rugby ball and surrounded by half a field’s worth of salad; I immediately resolve not to eat it all but it tastes far too good and besides, I wouldn’t want to upset the chef. I get lost trying to find the Gents and wander
past
some very nice-looking bedrooms on the first floor, gleaming in the sunlight as they’re cleaned and tidied. The short drive from Lybster to Wick is pleasant and relaxed, not quick, with lots of long settlements and little farms dotted along the way.

Wick is where mainland Scotland just about runs out. Poised on the fringe of the long flat Flow Country facing the often not so flat sea, near the corner where the North Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea bump into each other and tend to kick up a fuss about it, it’s way out of the way from almost everywhere apart from Thurso, which is a place you could say exactly the same things about except substituting ‘Thurso’ for ‘Wick’ and vice versa. I like both places; there’s a clean airiness about both, plus what at least from the outside looks like old fashioned civic pride about these limpetly extraneous, independent-feeling communities. Wick still has a mixture of fishing and agriculture to work with and Thurso, while worryingly close to Dounreay in every sense, feels like a miniature Norse capital of this remote corner of the British Isles; a preparation for the sheer difference that is Orkney.

The distillery at Wick is out towards the sea from the relative shelter of the town centre, through a quiet grid of streets and a tree-shaded square. Old Pulteney – ah, that questionable ‘Old’ again – is a small distillery, neatly slotted into the edge of the town, drawing its water from Loch Hempriggs. It’s not the only distillery that used to be some sort of mill – a meal mill in this case, where oats were ground to a powder – but it does have the longest lade in Scotland (a lade is just the old technical term for a channel bringing water to a mill).

It feels like the sort of place that doesn’t get that many visitors and perhaps because of that the welcome is relaxed and genuine. The distillery has a slightly compressed, higglety-pigglety air about it, largely as a result of being based on a conversion – the washback is in the still house and the squeezed-in-looking underback looks like a giant brass shell case. The stills are just plain weird; the wash still has a giant boiling ball above the main bowl, a squat neck which looks like an only slightly elongated copper bucket and a Lyne arm
that
emerges, pointing slightly downward, from barely more than halfway up this sawn-off looking structure (and it did have to be truncated when it was installed, to fit in under the low roof). The spirit still has a bizarre up-and-over piece of plumbing connecting it to a dustbin-sized copper purifier that essentially means the whisky is distilled two and a half times, then the pipes exit to an old-fashioned outside worm tub set up, sitting steaming gently at one end of that extremely long lade.

A dark feline slinks round a piece of pipe work just ahead of me as I’m shown round by Gordon, one of the managers. ‘Distillery cat?’ I ask.

‘Aye, that’s it.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘Oh, just The Cat,’ he says, nodding.

Fair enough. Given that Les and I have had two boats now both called The Boat and when I was a child all two of my hamsters were called Hammy, I’m in no position to cavil.

Gordon takes a hosepipe filling a barrel at one point and lets the clear raw spirit pour over his hands for a second, then pats his palms together and sniffs the result, inviting me to do the same. Washing your hands in spirit; cool, in every sense. The smell is not unpleasant; very chemically, astringent, a little sweet.

The finished whisky, after it’s been properly matured, is briny, fresh as you like and only slightly peaty. There’s no phenolising of the barley, so the peat flavour that is there must come from the water. Old Pulteney is a quick maturer, often bottled at eight years old, and the 12-year-old I got was sea-air bracing with touches of a clean, sharp sweetness. I don’t recall ever having tried this whisky before but I’m extremely glad I have now. What with this, Ord, Clynelish, Brora and Glenmorangie I seem to be developing a real taste for these far north-easters.

The drive back is notable for an unimpeded full-bore climb out of the depths at Berriedale Braes – when a slope has one of those deep gravel run-offs for suddenly brake-free heavies you know it’s a serious gradient – a pit stop at the Morangie
House
Hotel in Tain, a quick photo at Balblair distillery (I have yet to track down a bottle of this stuff) and a slight but entirely worthwhile detour via the highly splendid A836, a lightly trafficked route since the Dornoch Bridge was opened and just one of the most fun roads in this part of Scotland; effectively an A-road that’s become a fast, sky-exposed GWR simply by being bypassed.

The next morning it’s a kipper for breakfast, which, compared to your average Full Scottish is positively healthy (compared to the dread beguilements of the Buffet-the-waistline-slayer option it’s
incredibly
healthy). It’s another beauty of a day, a circumstance that feels only fitting given that we have the very pleasant prospect ahead of us of a drive home with a stop off for an extended tasting tour at what is for many people the distillery which produces entirely the best whisky in the whole wide world; Macallan.

Macallan. I almost changed my name for this whisky. Well, sort of. Back in 1985–86, after I’d had a couple of mainstream novels published, I’d decided to go back to my first love and try to get some of my science fiction published too. At the time my hardback publishers, Macmillan, didn’t really publish SF so I was expecting to go elsewhere with it. Using a different name for the SF novels seemed like a good idea, just so that people didn’t get confused. I came up with the name John B. Macallan. These were my two favourite whiskies at the time; Johnny Walker Black Label was my favourite blend and Macallan was my favourite single malt.

Two things meant this didn’t happen. One was that my editor, the estimable Mr James Hale, kept having to ask, What was that
nom-de-plume
again? Jim Beam Morangie, was that it?

Given that James was not entirely unfamiliar with Scotland’s finest product, this was not a sign that I had picked a particularly memorable name. The other thing was that Macmillan decided to publish my SF after all. So I dropped the idea of naming myself after two whiskies and settled for putting the ‘M’ back in my name. It had been there on the title page of
The Wasp Factory
when I’d submitted it to Macmillan in 1983
but
we’d removed it because James thought it looked a bit fussy and was worried people might make a subconscious connection with Rosie M. Banks, a character in Wodehouse’s novels who happens to be a very bad romantic novelist. While I’d been at Stirling University I had used the names Iain Banks, Iain M. Banks, Iain Menzies Banks and even Iain Menzies-Banks as part of a vicious let’s-fuck-with-the-establishment-man campaign to make the administration think there was more than one of me (there is no evidence whatever to suggest this had any subversive effect at all, other than causing me to be known by the admin people as That Git Who Can’t Decide What His Name Is).

Anyway, I was quite happy dropping the M, until I was upbraided by a couple of uncles for denying my birthright or something. I’d have put it straight back in there for my second novel, but that really might have confused things. The SF books seemed like the M’s rightful home, I reasoned. After all, hadn’t Brian Aldiss become Brian W. Aldiss when writing his non-SF books? Made perfect sense. Somebody once called it a transparent attempt on the World’s Most Penetrable Pseudonym record, but at least it kept my uncles happy. It did have the unfortunate effect of meaning I had to keep answering the question What does the M stand for? And sticking with plain Iain Banks for the SF would have made it clear that I was just as proud of those novels as I was of the mainstream books, rather than, as some people appeared to assume, obviously inserting the M to show that these were sub-standard entertainments, mere slumming-it indulgences compared to my serious, weighty non-genre works. (Ha!)

Maybe I should have stuck with John B. Macallan.

James Hale was a good friend and a brilliant editor. Back in 1983 it was James’s future wife, Hilary, who pulled
The Wasp Factory
off the slush pile – that’s the unflattering though usually symbolically depressingly accurate term publishers use to describe the unsolicited manuscripts they’re sent – and took it to James, who was then fiction editor at Macmillan. It was James who decided to publish the book, to publish me. It wasn’t as
though
my manuscript was so self-evidently stunning that the first editor to look at it was always going to grab it instantly, either, because Macmillan was the sixth publisher I’d sent it to, and others had thought about it but decided to pass.

James saw something in it though, and took the risk of publishing this weird story by a complete unknown, and I will forever be in his debt for that. I owe him just as much thanks for an opposite kind of favour too, because I once submitted a book to him which I wasn’t sure about and he told me it wasn’t good enough and he wasn’t prepared to publish it.

I met up with him at his and Hilary’s house at Peckam Rye a few days later; he was trying to repair the marble-topped table he’d broken when he’d realised the manuscript just wasn’t good enough (thumped it with his fist – only time I ever heard of James inflicting physical damage on human, beast or inanimate object). He confirmed he couldn’t take the book, but he also told me that there would be at least half a dozen publishers in London who’d jump at the chance of taking it on if I wanted to submit it elsewhere, and he wouldn’t stand in my way if I wanted to do so – those other publishers would know the book wasn’t very good, too, but I was a youngish and moderately hot property at the time and they’d publish the book just to get me on board and hope the next one might mark a return to form. This would be a strategic mistake for me to make, because a weak book remains a weak book, but James could understand any writer’s reluctance to throw away months of work.