Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
as a result I have a sort of sporadic, part-time addiction, and have decided that yes, that
old piece of poisonous propaganda my generation were peddled is actually true, cannabis
does lead you on to stronger and much, much more lethal drugs. Well, one, anyway; spe-
cifically, to tobacco, if that's what you mix it with. Ah, the joys of cretinous prohibition
(… we'll be returning to this theme later. Just in case you're under any illusions).
But it's odd; when I'm sober I hate the smell of cigarette smoke. I'm the kind of per-
son who tells people smoking on non-smoking trains to put their fag out. (Thinks: Hmm,
I believe the technical term for this is 'hypocrite'? No?) I even do this on the last train,
when people are often drunk and seem to think that makes it okay to smoke, and I've been
known to do this even when they're bigger than I am or there's more of them.
However. Just let me sink a few pints or a few whiskies or a few whatever and - es-
pecially if I'm with people who smoke - I start thinking that a cigarette would just round
the buzz off nicely. Usually I manage to resist. Sometimes, very drunk, feeling extremely
socially relaxed, I succumb, and start cadging fags off my pals.
And, while I may not pay for my habit in financial terms - apart from the occasions
when I feel I've smoked too many of somebody else's fags, when I'll go and buy them
a packet … though they're never my fags, you understand; they're my friends', be-
cause I don't really smoke, see? - I do pay. Extensive research has revealed that my
hangovers are consistently between 50 and 100 per cent worse the next morning if I've
been smoking, compared to the control group of Standard Bad Hangovers And Their Usu-
al Indicators (number and type of painkillers required, extent of sighing and quiet moan-
ing, ability to string more than three words together, depth of desire to consume large
greasy breakfasts, etc.).
On the ferry I also have a Cal Mac chicken curry and chips with lots of tomato sauce.
This is, I realise, your basic poor/horribilist cuisine, and almost as awful a confession as
owning up to smoking, but it's become something of a tradition for me on Caledonian
MacBrayne ships, especially on the five-hour journey from Oban to Barra, where Ann
and I spend a week or so most years.
We're talking the sort of curry you used to get in school, like chip shop curry or a
Chinese restaurant curry; curry like they almost don't do it anywhere else any more (and
for good reasons); frequently all glutinous with too much cornflour and with the chicken
meat often boiled and simmered down to fibres, the whole thing coloured a suspicious-
looking dark, mustardy yellow, doubtless loaded with sodium and E-numbers. Plus the
chips are rarely better than okay. However, as a strange sort of slumming-it treat, it works
for me. I actually look forward to one of these when we're planning trips to Barra, and I
was genuinely pleased to find that they had the same dish on the Islay service.
On the Barra trip I always know to take a dumpy little bottle of tomato sauce with me
so I have a decent helping with which to slather the chips, but even without that and being
