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remember watching that first episode on a pre-transmission video and being very nervous –
The Crow Road
was the first book I’d ever had successfully adapted for the screen – and when I saw that first image, and made the connection with the ferry journey I’d taken a year or so earlier, I had one of those It’s-going-to-be-all-right Good Omen feelings that I’m not sure atheists like me are really allowed to have (but appreciate now and again all the same), and relaxed, deciding that probably this was going to be a good adaptation. Which, I’m happy to report, it was.
    For the whole journey I’ve been listening to a mixture of the radio and some ancient select tapes; the radio for the latest news on the war and the old compilation tapes because I’m still feeling a bit emotional about the war, I suppose, and want something nostalgic and comforting to listen to. I’ve brought my Apple iPod too, along with the adaptor that lets it communicate with the Land Rover’s tape player (CDs are
far
too hi-tech for Defenders of this vintage; I counted myself lucky it hadn’t arrived with a seventies-stylee eight-track) but I haven’t bothered connecting it.
    So my listening consists of a mixture of breathless embedded journalists telling me how much progress the US and British troops are making, dashing across the sands towards Baghdad and Basra, and old songs from the decade before the first Gulf War.
    Tarbert to Kennacraig, where the ferry for Islay leaves, takes ten minutes. The voyage to Port Ellen lasts a couple of hours, the late afternoon becoming night. On the boat I sit in the bar reading the paper, soaking up the war, then read some of the whisky books I’ve brought along as research. I drink a couple of pints. Usually if I’m going to be driving later I don’t drink alcohol but if I’m on a long ferry journey with a very short drive at the far end I’ll allow myself up to the legal limit. Two pints of Export is safe enough, though it’s also heading up towards my other limit, when I start thinking, Hmm, quite fancy a fag.
    Blame the dope. When I first started smoking the occasional joint it was always resin crumbled into tobacco – I don’t think I
saw
grass for about ten years after my first J – and later, especially during what you might call binge smoking sessions, when my pals and I were arguably too wrecked to roll another number or load just one more bong, it was just sociable as well as a hell of a lot easier to have a straight, smoke an ordinary cigarette. So as a result I have a sort of sporadic, part-time addiction, and have decided that yes, that old piece of poisonous propaganda my generation were peddled is actually true, cannabis does lead you on to stronger and much, much more lethal drugs. Well, one, anyway; specifically, to tobacco, if that’s what you mix it with. Ah, the joys of cretinous prohibition (… we’ll be returning to this theme later. Just in case you’re under any illusions).
    But it’s odd; when I’m sober I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. I’m the kind of person who tells people smoking on non-smoking trains to put their fag out. (Thinks: Hmm, I believe the technical term for this is ‘hypocrite’? No?) I even do this on the last train, when people are often drunk and seem to think that makes it okay to smoke, and I’ve been known to do this even when they’re bigger than I am or there’s more of them.
    However. Just let me sink a few pints or a few whiskies or a few whatever and – especially if I’m with people who smoke – I start thinking that a cigarette would just round the buzz off nicely. Usually I manage to resist. Sometimes, very drunk, feeling extremely socially relaxed, I succumb, and start cadging fags off my pals.
    And, while I may not pay for my habit in financial terms – apart from the occasions when I feel I’ve smoked too many of somebody else’s fags, when I’ll go and buy them a packet … though they’re never my fags, you