Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Tired but happy, and in sore need of a celebratory drink.
Another Glenfinnan trip, another couple of distilleries. I'm alone in the M5 this weekend,
heading up the A9 to Pitlochry before continuing on to Les and Aileen's with a boot full
of what you might call Found Fireworks or Opportunist Pyrotechnics.
I have a weakness for explosions. Over the years this has manifested itself in many
different ways, and on a couple of occasions has solidified, as it were, into two groups of
letters: BAM and FLEE.
BAM stood for Banks And MacLennan, but it was the obvious schoolboy onomato-
poeia that was important (entirely appropriately, as my pal Andy MacLennan and I were
both schoolboys when we came up with the name). FLEE stands for Fife-Lochaber Ex-
plosive Entertainments (Ltd.) and is a more sober and serious enterprise altogether in as
much that it's a properly registered company with Companies House (Company number
SC2 13224, if you really want to know).
Now, obviously, if I'd ever been in a war, under fire, had anybody close to me die
in an explosion or lived in Northern Ireland during the seventies and eighties, I probably
wouldn't find explosions or explosives quite so entertaining. However, I've been lucky
enough to live a quiet and sheltered life and, to me, explosives have always basically been
of a recreational nature.
I'm tempted to blame Gerry Anderson and
Thunderbirds
. There were a lot of explo-
sions in
Thunderbirds
. I loved the fact that after the initial titles, while you were being
informed that the series was filmed in Videcolor and Supermarionation (whatever the hell
these were supposed to mean), there was an establishing shot of some huge desert install-
ation; a refinery or a power station or something which the camera lingered on after the
lettering faded … and then it just blew up! In a series of huge, totally gratuitous, com-
pletely plot-independent explosions! I was at an impressionable age at the time when I
first saw this and remember thinking, Wow! Brilliant!
Except I'd be lying, because me staring enraptured at the perfectly gratuitous screen-
borne exploso-fest was just an example of one already long-confirmed explosion freak
acknowledging the spoor of another. Long before my first exposure to
Thunderbirds
I'd
discovered I loved drawing explosions, throwing stones into the sea because splashes
were basically water-borne explosions and even chucking dried clods of earth across my
dad's vegetable garden because when the clods hit they flew apart as though exploding,
and the dust looked like smoke. And I always really liked fireworks.
In the sixties they'd practically sell you fireworks while you were still in your pram,
and the bangers were more powerful (no, really, they were). Good grief, back then you
could buy Jumping Jacks. Jumping Jacks were fireworks designed to explode serially -
and unpredictably - and jump around in random directions with each detonation. Can you
