Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
American will actually have voted for Dubya, but you never know, and in a convivial
atmosphere it's usually best to avoid unpleasantness. And they do refer to the word God-
damn as “Gee Dee”, which is sort of charming while being infinitely worrying at the same
time. I promise to send an SF book to Tina, and they insist if we're ever in Florida we
must visit them. I manage to keep my trap shut about the passport thing.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, after eleven protesters are shot and killed by the US forces in the
town of Falluja, the townspeople stage a protest over the killings. So the Americans kill
two of those protesters too.
Meanwhile two British Moslem guys who've flown out to Israel become our first
home-grown suicide bombers.
Amazingly, still no Weapons of Mass Destruction …
The Bunchrew suffers an atypical power cut just in time for breakfast the following morn-
ing so we head off into one more gloriously clear and sunny day, heading north towards
Wick via Beauly, Muir of Ord and Brora, where we stop to have a look round Clynelish
distillery.
I know this road well; the first bit from the days of driving to and from Nigg Bay
and Portmahomack, and the sections north of Tain from driving to Thurso for the ferry to
Orkney, where Ann's eldest sister Jenny and her husband James live. There are a lot of
good long straights up to Tain but the road as ever is fairly busy in both directions and it
isn't until after Tain that the traffic thins and the road offers up its wonderfulness.
These days, passing the Cromarty Firth, I count the drilling rigs sitting out on the wa-
ter. This is a Bill Drummond thing. Bill Drummond was one of the band called KLF back
in the eighties and also part of the K Foundation, the guys who burned a million quid on
Islay (it would have been hopelessly uncool, while I was on Islay the month before, to
have sought out the place where they performed the burning, so I didn't). Drummond's a
fascinating character and my pal Gary Lloyd has been something of a fan for a long time.
He gave me a present of one of Drummond's books,
How To Be An Artist
, which involves
the man, back in 1998, driving his Land Rover Defender (ha!) from southern England to
Dounreay nuclear power station, on the north coast of Scotland, stopping every now and
again to take pictures of a sign that says 'FOR SALE, A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind.
Richard Long. $20,000' (long story - read the topic). In this he mentions counting the
rigs on the Cromarty Firth as he passes by on the A9. So I do this as well, such conduct
counting as a sufficiently mild symptom of fan-boy homage behaviour not to be too em-
barrassing to mention in a book like this one, obviously.
When we first started making this journey, once past Tain you still had to go round the
Dornoch Firth, only crossing the river at Bonar Bridge, but nowadays a long low bridge
sweeps over the sand and waves from just past the Glenmorangie distillery. The local
