Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Getting on to the ferry from Portavadie to Tarbert is a bit easier than it used to be; last
time I was here you had to reverse onto the boat, which must have been fun if you were
towing a caravan. Back then, a few years ago now, my car was the only vehicle on the
ferry, which felt kind of romantic somehow. I was on the way to meet an ex-girlfriend for
lunch; a strictly platonic visit, but, still, there was a certain poignancy there.
A year or so later the same ferry figured at the start of the first episode of the TV
adaptation of
The Crow Road
, with young Joe McFadden playing the central character,
Prentice McHoan, standing all alone on the deck, coming back to his family home for
a funeral. I remember watching that first episode on a pre-transmission video and being
very nervous -
The Crow Road
was the first book I'd ever had successfully adapted for
the screen - and when I saw that first image, and made the connection with the ferry jour-
ney I'd taken a year or so earlier, I had one of those It's-going-to-be-all-right Good Omen
feelings that I'm not sure atheists like me are really allowed to have (but appreciate now
and again all the same), and relaxed, deciding that probably this was going to be a good
adaptation. Which, I'm happy to report, it was.
For the whole journey I've been listening to a mixture of the radio and some ancient
select tapes; the radio for the latest news on the war and the old compilation tapes because
I'm still feeling a bit emotional about the war, I suppose, and want something nostalgic
and comforting to listen to. I've brought my Apple iPod too, along with the adaptor that
lets it communicate with the Land Rover's tape player (CDs are
far
too hi-tech for De-
fenders of this vintage; I counted myself lucky it hadn't arrived with a seventies-stylee
eight-track) but I haven't bothered connecting it.
So my listening consists of a mixture of breathless embedded journalists telling me
how much progress the US and British troops are making, dashing across the sands to-
wards Baghdad and Basra, and old songs from the decade before the first Gulf War.
Tarbert to Kennacraig, where the ferry for Islay leaves, takes ten minutes. The voyage to
Port Ellen lasts a couple of hours, the late afternoon becoming night. On the boat I sit in
the bar reading the paper, soaking up the war, then read some of the whisky topics I've
brought along as research. I drink a couple of pints. Usually if I'm going to be driving
later I don't drink alcohol but if I'm on a long ferry journey with a very short drive at the
far end I'll allow myself up to the legal limit. Two pints of Export is safe enough, though
it's also heading up towards my other limit, when I start thinking, Hmm, quite fancy a
fag.
Blame the dope. When I first started smoking the occasional joint it was always resin
crumbled into tobacco - I don't think I
saw
grass for about ten years after my first J - and
later, especially during what you might call binge smoking sessions, when my pals and I
were arguably too wrecked to roll another number or load just one more bong, it was just
sociable as well as a hell of a lot easier to have a straight, smoke an ordinary cigarette. So
