Authors: Iain Banks
Illegality: a thought experiment
.
Okay, here’s the scenario:
A kid, say ten years old or so, finds a tenner on the pavement. Or maybe they nick it out of their mum’s purse. Whatever. They go to an off-licence. They reach up, slap the
note
on the counter and in a high, childish voice say, ‘Bottle of vodka, please, mister.’
What? Nine out of ten? Nineteen out of twenty? Ninety-nine out of a hundred? (Adjust according to level of cynicism or outright experience.) Regardless of the exact proportion, the vast majority of people behind the counter at an off-licence are going to tell the kid to get out; they can’t serve them. And most would say the same thing if the kid asks for a packet of fags.
So the kid goes back onto the street, finds a dealer and says, ‘Can I have a tenner’s worth of heroin, please?’
Again, we’re probably talking nine out of ten, nineteen out of twenty or ninety-nine out of a hundred. Except this time the numbers are reversed, and it’s only one dealer in ten, one dealer in twenty or one dealer in a hundred who would turn the child away and not sell them what they’ve asked for.
So what is the best way of protecting our children, controlling mind-altering substances and ameliorating the damage to society caused by these things, given that the demand is unarguably there?
Don’t forget that in the off-licence the drink will be of a guaranteed quality and effectively unadulterated because if it ever isn’t there will be commercial hell to pay. Don’t forget that the dope can be as contaminated, cut and crap as the dealer thinks they can get away with, because nobody’s going to complain to their local M.P. or Food Standards lab. Don’t forget that tobacco sends 110,000 people to an early grave in Britain alone and alcohol over 40,000.
Seriously; which way protects the best: legal control or simple illegality? Can you honestly see any excuse for sticking with the absurd system we have at the moment? I mean apart from sheer conservative-with-a-small-c idiocy?
Right, rant over.
Big silver bird in sky! Well, medium-size silver bird, anyway; a BA/Logan Air twin-prop Saab 340 from Edinburgh to Kirkwall via a brief touchdown at Wick. As we’re on the approach into Wick I see the Old Pulteney distillery but otherwise it’s been a frustrating flight because there’s been so much
cloud.
Flying – preferably not too high – over country you know is one of life’s great pleasures. Must learn to fly. Maybe next year.
I suppose I’m getting a bit demob-happy at this point; the quest is almost over (just the paperwork to do, but then I generally enjoy that too, so what the hey), plus there’s a feeling that I’m saving some of the best for last; I know Highland Park pretty well already and there’s a lot to look forward to here. I’m also feeling slightly smug because I got through security at Edinburgh with my Swiss Army Card. This is a sort of Swiss Army knife in a credit-card-sized bit of plastic; it has a little knife with a three-centimetre blade and a dainty pair of miniature scissors.
Frankly you’d struggle to hijack a tandem with a piece of kit like this, but thanks to the hysterical and absurd reaction to the September 11th attacks you’re not supposed to carry such things on to a plane any more (I did try pointing out in
Dead Air
that if you can’t take a blade or even a tool onto a plane, why are we glasses wearers allowed to take our specs on board? Give me a second to pop the lens out the frame and snap it in half and I’d almost instantly have two of the sharpest blades you can find. Sense? Logic? Don’t think so). Anyway, I forgot to remove the card from my wallet this morning and I only realised I’d got through the security check with it afterwards. It’d be tempting fate to try the same trick deliberately on the way back, so I’ll put the card in my bag and my bag in the hold.
From Wick it’s a less-than-fifteen-minute hop to Kirkwall, but at least the clouds have mostly cleared. We fly over the north-east tip of Scotland, over Duncansby Head and John O’Groats and within sight of the real most northerly point of mainland Scotland at Dunnet Head. Then it’s out over the white stroked waters of the perpetually restless Pentland Firth and the island of Stroma – lying in the sea like a giant green jigsaw piece – and banking past the fabulously dramatic thousand-foot cliffs of Hoy and the island’s Old Man, a wave-washed pinnacle of layered red rock knuckled out from the cliffs like a colossal cubist tree trunk.
To the west, as the plane banks for Kirkwall airport, stretches
Scapa
Flow, the base for the Home Fleet during the First and Second World Wars. It’s where the German High Seas fleet was scuttled after the end of the Great War, and where my dad was based during WWII, when the service men and women far outnumbered the local inhabitants. Way in the distance, built where the rusting hulks of the earlier block ships used to lie, the Churchill Barriers make delicate pale lines across the grey-blue sea, slim causeways between the isles.
Taxi from Kirkwall airport to the Kirkwall Hotel and room overlooking the harbour. Take away the harbour and it would just be a nice view looking out to the shores and hills across the sound, but with the harbour involved it’s one of the most fascinating views you could ask for. There are ferries coming from and going to the other Orcadian islands throughout the long hours of daylight, fishing boats setting off high and returning low in the water, catches being landed, and people pottering about on power boats and yachts – many of them from Norway – all the time. On the horizon to the north, one of the big wind generators on Burgar Hill revolves serenely, like a white giant doing cartwheels. The only thing missing is one of the big cruise ships that regularly call in during the summer.
Orkney: a Handy Hint on blending in
.
If you ever go to Orkney – and you should – never call Scotland ‘the mainland’. Orkney has its own Mainland; that’s the correct name for the big island that Kirkwall and the other sizable town, Stromness, are on. Scotland is called Scotland. The Orcadians don’t really think of themselves as all that Scottish at all; they’re Orcadians.
Look, these people have two distilleries, some of the best whisky made in … the British Isles and a make of beer called Skullsplitter; it’s as well to keep on the right side of them.
Ann snoozes. I take a taxi to Scapa distillery for a quick photo, then onwards the mile or so to Highland Park. Scapa is closed, shut up, deserted, and profoundly unphotogenic. Highland
Park
is smart without being too fussy, and looks happily busy. My taxi driver used to be a barman in the seventies here and remembers when the two Orcadian distilleries were level pegging on production and pretty much reputation too. Back then, he tells me, there was real rivalry between the Scapa and the Highland Park workers; if a Scapa man came into the bar and asked for a whisky you couldn’t serve him with Grouse because there was Highland Park in Grouse; he’d have to have a different blend, like Cutty Sark. And vice versa. We talk about how they’re going to be starting a distillery on Shetland later this year or early next year, which will mean that Highland Park will have to remove the statement, ‘The Northernmost Scotch Whisky Distillery in the World’ from its packaging. ‘Aye,’ the driver says, ‘the Shelties have been jealous of us having two distilleries and them having none for years.’
Since the seventies, Scapa and Highland Park have gone in opposite directions; Scapa obscure, almost completely unpromoted and barely known, bumping along the bottom, mostly quiet with only occasional short bursts of activity, and Highland Park going from strength to strength, celebrating its bi-centenary five years ago with a flourish and a big party that brought whisky connoisseurs and writers from all over the world, releasing various medal-winning expressions of huge repute and just generally establishing a deserved reputation as one of the very best malts made anywhere.
This is a good tour to do; while the open-plan, one-box-solution Arran tour lets you see really clearly how all the different bits of the process fit together, the Highland Park tour winds through the different stages building by building, but has more stages to see in the first place. There’s the realthing malting floors, for a start, with the barley laid out in great flat drifts, like absurdly thick piled golden carpets covering the floor. You’re encouraged to lift a few grains and sniff them, but asked not to eat them. Given that the distillery workers are wandering about in their work boots through the barley, sticking thermometers into it while you’re doing this, it’s an easy request to comply with.
The old malt shovels and hand-dragged wooden rakes still
lie
about the place, although most of the turning of the malt – to stop it matting or overheating – is done by a rather Heath Robinson machine with leather-wrapped paddles that looks like a cross between a rotavator, a big old-fashioned lawn mower and one of the less successful but defiantly eccentric contestants from
Robot Wars
.
Next there’s the kilns, proper age-of-steam-looking waist-level fires in big brick and iron ranges that look like they’ve come straight out of a twenties film set in a tramp steamer. You half expect a couple of swarthy Lascars to appear at any moment, stripped to the waist with grimy bandannas tied round their sweaty heads, to shovel more coke into the furnace. The kilns burn peat for the first sixteen or so hours of the malt-drying process, then switch to coke for the last twenty hours, until the barley only holds about five per cent moisture. The humid gases released from the drying chambers exit the distillery through the two very-much-not-decorative pagodas which rise above the complex of buildings set on a low hill just outside Kirkwall.
You can tell they make a lot of whisky here. The mash tun is huge, they have a dozen washbacks – two steel ones outside and ten inside made from Douglas fir – and the stills are big too, with flattish Lyne arms and outside condensers. When I’m looking round in late July they’ve just started production again after a six-week silent season for maintenance and general refitting. During this time the workers spent four weeks at Scapa distillery, producing a batch of malt there. The distilleries are owned by quite separate companies – HP by the Edrington Group and Scapa by Allied Distillers – but they’ve got an agreement to do this and obviously everybody feels they benefit. So at least there will be some 2003 Scapa.
Highland Park bottles at 12, 15, 18, 25, 35 and 40 years, plus the occasional special (I choose an 18-year-old at 43 per cent abv). The 12-year-old is already a phenomenal, potent dram, and the stuff just generally gets better and better as it gets older. Sweet, smoky, smooth and opulent, filled to bursting with spicy fruits and a long, hazily luxuriant and powerful finish, this is magnificent whisky.
There is a kind of wide-spectrum plushness about the
18-year-old
that is as impressive for the way it’s balanced as it is for the sheer amount of flavour packed into it. In the same way that it’s much easier to do cool-looking minimalist interior design compared to cool-looking intricate, complex interior design, it takes more skill to create a flavour-jammed whisky that feels rounded and harmonious than it does a relatively bare, stripped-down expression. The 18-year-old turns this trick with seeming ease; a bravura piece of polished burr walnut beauty amongst plain sanded pines. I’ve sampled the 25-year-old version and it’s better still. Tasted in Orkney, looking out into the clear northerly light, these jostle for that Best Dram So Far title.
Highland Park may not be the Most Northerly Scotch for much longer but it’ll still be one of the very best.
Work done, we dine at the hotel with Jenny – Ann’s eldest sister – and her husband James. James is a Dewar, and distantly related to the whisky family (and even more distantly to me, I suppose, as the Dewars were part of the Menzies clan). Jenny and James moved to Orkney over a decade ago and seem happily settled here. While they were thinking about moving here the four of us spent a few weeks on the islands, staying in a house in Finstown shaped like an up-turned boat – complete with seals cavorting in the sea on the other side of the garden wall – and later touring most of the other islands, staying in hotels and B&Bs. We’ve stayed with Jenny and James in their house just outside Stromness many times over the subsequent years, often around the time of the Orkney Folk Festival, but on this occasion it seemed sensible to keep to Kirkwall, especially as we’re only here for the one night.
It’s a good, fun evening but we call it a day fairly early as we’ve all got stuff to do in the morning. Sadly, Ann and I will miss the end of Shopping Week in Stromness tomorrow night (does anywhere else have a Shopping Week? Or only Stromness? Never mind). The point is they always have good fireworks on the last night of Shopping Week, even though it does have to be said that fireworks in Orkney in the middle of the summer will basically have to be set against a still-light
sky,
almost no matter how late in the evening you wait before setting them off (on Midsummer’s Day at Jenny and James’s house about ten years ago I did that thing where you read a newspaper outside with only the glow of the midnight sky for illumination).
The next day, before we leave, we meet up with Andrew Greig and Lesley Glaister; they have a house in Stromness too. Andrew and I met through Ken, when Andrew had a place in South Queensferry. We used to get together in the Ferry Tap and drink pints of Dark Island beer, brewed – appropriately enough – in Orkney. Andrew and Lesley married last year and have just returned from Borneo where Andrew’s been researching his latest novel. Lesley’s still recovering from having come back with a nasty-sounding bug, but she’s working on the production of a play and at the planning stage of a new novel too. Scribblers three and one civilian, we spend a happy couple of hours exploring an old farm track or two in their car and walking along a beach near the airport in what feels like Mediterranean weather. Ann and Andrew both go paddling.
Being Orkney, littered with the detritus of wars as well as 8000 years of occupation from the neolithic onwards, the quiet bay cupped by the beach holds not just the slim white shape of an anchored yacht but the picturesquely corroding remains of what looks like an old destroyer, mouldering away to rust and nothing under the high ubiquitous searchlight of the sun.