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understand; they’re my friends’, because I don’t really smoke, see? – I do pay. Extensive research has revealed that my hangovers are consistently between 50 and 100 per cent worse the next morning if I’ve been smoking, compared to the control group of Standard Bad Hangovers And Their Usual Indicators (number and type of painkillers required, extent of sighing and quiet moaning, ability to string more than three words together, depth of desire to consume large greasy breakfasts, etc.).
    On the ferry I also have a Cal Mac chicken curry and chips with lots of tomato sauce. This is, I realise, your basic poor/horribilist cuisine, and almost as awful a confession as owning up to smoking, but it’s become something of a tradition for me on Caledonian MacBrayne ships, especially on the five-hour journey from Oban to Barra, where Ann and I spend a week or so most years.
    We’re talking the sort of curry you used to get in school, like chip shop curry or a Chinese restaurant curry; curry like they almost don’t do it anywhere else any more (and for good reasons); frequently all glutinous with too much cornflour and with the chicken meat often boiled and simmered down to fibres, the whole thing coloured a suspicious-looking dark, mustardy yellow, doubtless loaded with sodium and E-numbers. Plus the chips are rarely better than okay. However, as a strange sort of slumming-it treat, it works for me. I actually look forward to one of these when we’re planning trips to Barra, and I was genuinely pleased to find that they had the same dish on the Islay service.
    On the Barra trip I always know to take a dumpy little bottle of tomato sauce with me so I have a decent helping with which to slather the chips, but even without that and being forced to use a handful of those annoying little sachets instead, it is a joy. Albeit a guilty one.
    Of course, when I get to where I’m going I find that my hosts have cooked some fresh-off-the-farm’s-own-fields lamb with gleaming new potatoes and a selection of succulent vegetables, and I feel really guilty about the mass-production time warp pseudo curry I’ve just eaten on the boat, but that’s just the way it goes. Anyway, I have a couple of glasses of wine, and then another couple of glasses of wine … and then a second dinner partly out of politeness but partly also because it all just looks and smells so good.
    And that, I strongly suspect, is the start of a process which sees me put on nearly a stone in weight during the laughingly entitled ‘research’ phase of this book.

2: Does not Rhyme with
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Outlay
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    ‘BANKSIE, WHAT’S THIS about you writing a book about whisky?’
    ‘It’s true. They’re going to pay me to drive round Scotland, or be driven round Scotland … whatever, visiting distilleries and drinking whisky.’
    ‘So it wasn’t a joke?’
    ‘No, not a joke.’
    ‘And you’re sure it’s not a dream you’ve, like, mistaken for reality?’
    ‘Definitely. I have a signed contract. Want to hear it rustle?’
    ‘Just wanted to be sure. So, you’ll be wanting help with this …’
    The first signpost you see coming off the ferry at Port Ellen on Islay has only two words on it; it points right to ARDBEG and left to BOWMORE. Brilliant, I thought; a road sign that is made up 100 per cent of distillery names; a proclamation that you are on an island where the making of whisky is absolutely integral to the place itself, where directions are defined by drink!
    This was, patently, a great place to start the distillery tour. I love Islay whiskies. There are seven working distilleries on the island – pretty good given that there are less than three thousand people on the place – each producing their own distinctive whiskies, and I have a deep affection for all of them. I have favourites amongst those seven basic malts, but they’re basically all in my top twenty Scotches. This may, I suppose, change over the course of the next two or three months as I