Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
But anyway; of
course
I bought all the whisky books Leakey's had! I can probably,
I remind myself, even claim them against tax. But the main point is;
they're books
. And
I have a reason to buy them; I am almost beholden to buy them. I owe it to the whisky
book to buy them, to my publishers, to my readers! It would be dereliction of duty not to
buy them; they were there, they were for sale, I'm writing a book on the subject they're
all about; isn't it
obvious
I have to rescue all of them?
In the end I do read all of them. Well, almost all of almost all of them; they end up
covering a large part of a table to one side of my writing desk with lots of little strips of
Post-It notes sticking out of them denoting Interesting Snippety Bits which at the time
I'm totally convinced I'll faithfully incorporate into this topic, though when it comes to it
the vast majority of them get ignored.
We stay at the Bunchrew Hotel, along the Beauly Firth east of Inverness. This is an old
bishops' palace set amongst a profusion of huge, mature trees. It stands right by the water
at high tide and looks out over towards the Black Isle. It's that shade of traditional pink
that apparently used to be produced by mixing whitewash with pig's blood (that's what
they used to do in the old days, I have it on good authority) and it has the pointiest pointy
turrets you ever did see. Does lots of weddings.
Fine food, equally fine wine, a whisky or two, a good night's sleep and another gener-
ous breakfast. We part at Glenfinnan the following afternoon and Ann sleeps most of the
way down the A9. All right for her; I have a day to recover from all this good living then
I'm back on the road and back to Speyside with my pals Jim and Dave for another week
of intensive research.
