Authors: Iain Banks
That the nearly 40-year-old Jag feels about right at our national speed limits – even given that it was a serious performance car in its day, the sixties equivalent of the M5 – does highlight how daft these limits sometimes feel in a modern car. Not often, perhaps, and with decreasing frequency, but now and again – for example on certain wide, straightish, flatish Highland roads, especially if they’re fenced or the country on either side is clear enough for the driver to spot any wildlife approaching the road – 60 feels idiotically slow.
On the other hand, sometimes 60 feels far too fast even when in theory it’s what you’re allowed to do. Like a lot of drivers I have my own set of speed limits on roads I know well; often they’re a bit faster than the legal ones, but sometimes they’re a lot slower. One route I take regularly passes through three villages with no posted speed limits but I treat them like 30 or 40 zones according to the conditions, and I suspect that all other drivers who aren’t complete nutters do the same thing.
Ultimately cars are useful but dangerous things and we have to decide where we draw the line between allowing them to remain useful and attenuating the threat they pose. Having no speed limits would be one slightly insane solution (you’d just have to charge people with dangerous driving if they caused death, injury or damage, though of course by then it’s too late for whoever was killed or injured), but, then, if you’re really,
really
serious about reducing those killed and injured on the roads, why not set the national speed limit at three miles per hour? No, seriously. Then if somebody found themselves in the path of a car or a truck or a bus they could just stroll out of the way. You might manage a whole year with no road deaths whatsoever. Obviously the economy would collapse and we’d all effectively become hermits, but then maybe it would lead to the revival of the railways, with branch lines everywhere. Mind you; trains crash too. Maybe they should have a walking-pace speed limit as well … And let’s not even start on aeroplanes. I suppose balloons and dirigibles – so long as they’re helium filled – might be okay.
The three-mile-an-hour national speed limit is arguably an even madder idea than no speed limits at all, but it has a certain logic to it and it forces us to confront the question: how much do we value human lives? What exactly are we prepared to give up to save some?
However, let’s not forget that this is all within the context of a society that doesn’t get all
that
bothered over the fact that in excess of one hundred and ten thousand Brits die every year from smoking tobacco, or the fact that alcohol abuse kills tens of thousands too. Three thousand people die every single day from malaria, but they’re mostly children and in Africa so they don’t matter, it would seem. One injustice doesn’t excuse another, but let’s at least admit that we prioritise and contextualise our outrage at unnecessary death.
One conducts the Jaguar through to Greenock and thence to Dalmuir, in Clydebank. In Greenock one collects one’s friend Mr David McCartney. In Clydebank one picks up one’s other chum, Mr James S. Brown.
The Jag is a quite different car to drive after the M5, but by Clydebank I’ve just about acclimatised. Clydebank is a semi-post-industrial district of high- and low-rise schemes and mostly abandoned shipyards which was bombed heavily in the Second World War and has picked up many more scars since. It has its pleasant areas, there’s been some redevelopment and Dalmuir itself is quite leafy in places, but the general
area
has its problem patches too: poverty, poor health and violence, much of it drug-related.
Substances: the usual disclaimer
.
[As ever, what we call drug-related violence is really drug-prohibition-related violence, and the drug which is by far the most commonly associated directly with violence is alcohol. In the – hopefully unlikely – event you sincerely believe that our current drug laws are mostly fairly sensible but just not applied with sufficient stringency, please feel free, of course, to ignore this paragraph, as it has some connection to common sense and therefore does not remotely concern you.]
The drive up Loch Lomond side, across Rannoch Moor and through Glencoe is necessarily a little more sedate than it would have been in the BMW, but the Jag can pick up its skirts and make an overtaking dash when it needs to all the same, and the engine sounds great when it’s gunned, like a Tyrannosaurus fart sampled and played back at 960 b.p.m. Standard overtaking technique is to drop out of overdrive and plant the right foot. It’s an electrically switched overdrive unit so you’re not supposed to need to declutch when engaging or disengaging, but I always do, in deference to the Jag’s age.
Corners with lots of white paint are usually taken out of overdrive too, just to get the car better balanced on its rear suspension under power (in the M5 you’d just breeze through on a constant throttle opening with nary a thought. This is one of the most noticeable effects of a really fast car asked to tackle ordinary roads at a relative dawdle; the corners seem to disappear and the road effectively becomes one long straight – blimey, at legal speeds the M5 probably thinks there are only about three bends in the whole of Scotland).
The three of us know this route well, but from Loch Lomond onwards it’s still breathtaking.
‘Nice lake, eh, Banksie?’ Jim says.
‘Yeah yeah yeah, very fucking funny.’
I moved to London from Gourock at the very end of 1979 and started work as Law Costs Draughtsman in April of 1980. For the first few months I stayed at Dave’s flat in Belsize Road. He’d been the first of the people I knew in Greenock to move down to London – I was about the third or fourth – but eventually it seemed like almost everybody I’d known back in Inverclyde was living in London. Jim moved down a year or so after me. He ended up working for a firm called Save and Prosper, which I said at the time was a little like King Herod working for Mothercare, but then I can be cruel. Ann and I met at work shortly after I’d joined the firm, then moved in together the following year. In 1983 we went to live in Faversham, in Kent, closer to Ann’s parents in Canterbury but still a reasonable commute to London.
I will never be allowed to forget the fact that once, when Ann and I had the house in Faversham and Jim still lived in London, the three of us were on holiday, driving north up the side of Loch Lomond, when Jim suggested stopping to take a photograph of the view looking back the way we’d come, and I said something like, ‘Yeah, I think there’s a lay-by just round this corner, you can get a good view down the lake from there.’
‘The
what
, Banksie? A good view down the
what
?’
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘I said “lake”, didn’t I?’
Ann was laughing quietly.
Jim shook his head, a great big smile on his face. ‘Oh dear oh dear oh dear. You’ve been down south
far
too long, El Bonko.’
‘And you’re going to tell everybody, aren’t you?’
He shrugged as we pulled into the lay-by. ‘You’ve brought it on yourself, pal; I’ve no sympathy. Anyway, if I’d said something like that, would
you
let
me
off? Eh?’
I thought about this. I sighed. ‘Fair enough.’
We stop for a fag break at Fort William – smoking is banned in the cars. It’s another fabulous day and the weather is getting positively warm. We stand in the loch-side car park at the southern end of the town centre and look out at the loch and the hills on the far side.
Dave is the oldest of the three of us; just over 50 now (we work out that 50 is our average age). Like me he’s bearded, though even greyer; almost white. Jim looks exactly like Robert De Niro in
Jackie Brown
, something I find startling. Not as startling as he does, though.
‘Really?’ He looks quite pleased.
‘Oh, yeah,’ I tell him. ‘Though it has to be said that Robert De Niro looks pretty shit in
Jackie Brown
.’
Jim sniffs. ‘Well, fuck off then.’
Dave is our official driver for the week and is even getting paid for the privilege, the vestigial remnant of the garrulous Glaswegian in the original concept for this book (well, it is his profession, and taxi drivers don’t get paid holidays). He walks round the car, kicking the Jag’s tyres. ‘You sure this old thing’s up to taking us round Speyside for a week?’
‘It’s the youngest of the the four of us, Dave,’ I tell him, pointedly. ‘And it hasn’t let us down yet, has it?’
‘Hmm,’ Dave concedes, ‘not yet.’
‘Exactly, and has anything fallen off?’
‘Aye,’ Jim says. ‘That dooberry off the rear quarter light.’
‘That doesn’t count! It’s just a bit off the locking mechanism!’
‘The locking mechanism?’ Dave says. ‘Right. So the car can get broken into easily. Tut-tut, Banksie. Hope the boot locks.’
I look at him through narrowed eyes. ‘Climb in and we’ll find out.’
‘Oh-oh. He’s getting tetchy,’ Jim says to Dave.
‘I am not getting tetchy.’
‘Aye,’ Dave agrees. ‘First day and all. Thought we’d go longer than that before he started getting tetchy.’
‘Look, I’m not—’
‘First afternoon, in fact. That’s extreme tetchiness. Even by Banksie The King of Tetch standards.’
‘Will you two stop it? I am not in any way—’
‘This could be a long week.’
‘Look, I am simply not—’
‘Aye. Right enough. What with Banksie getting tetchy so quickly.’
‘I am
not
getting
tetchy
!’
I have to suffer more of this outrageous tetchiness slander in bursts all the way up the road through the Great Glen towards Inverness. This road, the A82, is pretty good; usually fairly busy, but with enough decent straights to allow some overtaking unless there are absurd amounts of oncoming traffic. There is one bit at the side of the imaginatively named Loch Lochy – my, must have been a hard night’s brain-wracking in the smoke-filled bothy to come up with
that
one – where there is a cliff on one side of the road and the loch on the other. This is one of the few places where I’ve always reckoned it’s relatively safe to speed – albeit only briefly and always providing the road is empty – just because there is so little likelihood of a sheep or a deer wandering out on front of the car. There are actually two straights, the southern one shorter than the northern, with a hotel on a sort of wiggle in the middle which spoils what would otherwise have been an even more impressive length of road, but it’s still a sweet stretch. And still no speed cameras. Amazing.
The Jaguar takes even this section at a steady 60 or so; rolling along happily, its engine issuing a burbling roar as though it’s perpetually trying to clear its throat. The Jag is a very relaxing car to drive, even though it takes a little more concentration than a modern vehicle. It’s that suited-to-the-legal-limit thing again; you don’t feel that you ought to be going faster just because the car can handle it, and because you’re in no danger of being snapped by a speed camera or tripping a radar trap, you can stop worrying about that as well. It’s almost as though you’re driving in an era before there were such annoyances. Time warp driving. (You get that in the M5 too, though only in the sense that it goes so fast there are times when you’d swear you’ve arrived before you set off.)
When I was a child and we drove this road we really did keep one eye on Loch Ness, just in case we saw the monster. Well, simpler times. Back then you could still just about believe that a few fuzzily photographed floating logs, grainy footage of boats’ wakes, one or two fairly obvious faked stills and the
testament
of a handful of people could add up to evidence that there was some throwback to the age of the dinosaurs haunting the dark depths of the great long loch.
Then people got serious about it and set up viewing platforms with multiple still and film – later, video – cameras, sonar sensors and underwater microphones, and the sightings stopped.
The Loch Ness monster seems to be one of those quantum creatures, maybe distantly related to Schrodinger’s Cat; its existence is only possible when there’s nobody there to observe it.
A friend of mine called Ron Binns once wrote a book called
The Loch Ness Mystery Solved
, which basically went through all the evidence clear-eyed and unbiased and came to the fairly inescapable conclusion the whole monster thing was a load of old Highland bollocks, but because this wasn’t what people particularly wanted to hear, you’ll struggle to find the book in any loch-side tourist shop (though last time I was there they had a copy in Lochaber High School Library, so it might have helped sow the seeds of a healthy scepticism in a few young minds).
Our musical accompaniment for the week in the Jag is largely retro, majoring on people like Graham Parker, John Mellencamp and Steve Gibbons, then at the chalet we listen to music by the at-this-point-not-quite-dead-yet Warren Zevon. I’ve brought what I thought was the best album of last year,
By The Way
by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and albums by Black Rebel Motor Cycle Club and lots of ‘The’ bands, like The White Stripes, The Hives, The Vines and The Strokes. I’ve also brought some Led Zep, Pixies, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and early Ozrics, but most of these don’t get played and the ones that do don’t really seem to meet with the positive reception I’d been hoping for.
Back to Inverness. We’re only here because the self-catering chalet in Glenlivet we’re booked into for the rest of the week can’t take us until tomorrow. I thought self-catering would be a better idea for us three guys than a hotel, especially when Jim started talking about the size of the sound system we’d need to take with us, however for this first night we’re staying
at
the Highland Hotel in the centre of Inverness. This used to be the Station Hotel and Ann and I have stayed here a couple of times, once after a train journey from Kyle of Lochalsh and once en route to Thurso by train, heading for Orkney. I’d hoped to park the Jag in the wee square right outside the hotel entrance itself, but it’s full and I have to stick it round the corner in a car park at the back of the station. It was that or the nearby multi-storey. Should have gone for the multi-storey.