too warm for whisky?

Like much of Britain, Europe, the northern hemisphere etc., I have been paying attention to the weather. It is hard to avoid. Weather gets everywhere.

My room receives very little in the way of ventilation and quite a lot of heat. I succumbed to my environmentally questionable portable AC unit last night, but plan to stick to the fan this evening. The hope is to find a sweet spot where comfort is possible, the cat still feels welcome (he is not a fan of the AC) and I keep my contribution to the destruction of the environment to a minimum.

People deal with their discomforts in different ways. Some become harbingers of doom, shrieking at the top of their lungs that sensible people somehow forget to drink water when it’s very hot, and that this the end of the world as we know it. Others revert to the curmudgeon and sceptic, shouting loudly that “summer is hot” and “why is everyone making such a fuss?”

Me? I find both the sensationalism of the press and doomsayers and the blinkered shortsightedness of the sceptics almost equally annoying. I find my comfort, in part, in working out which of the two annoys me more. I suppose this makes me some manner of centrist with regards to weather chat, which is terribly unfortunate as it’s not a very good time be a centrist in anything. It doesn’t concern me too much, however, because I am becoming far less centrist in almost everything else.

The curmudgeons and sceptics are the most annoying though. This weather isn’t normal. It hasn’t been normal for some time. Nothing is fucking normal, you fucking idiots. The planet is in such a state of flux in every facet of existence that we have to look to either geology or astronomy to find anything that could be described as “normal” or “going to plan”.

It doesn’t make the doomsayers any less annoying, mind. Perhaps that’s why people ignore them and doom keeps happening?

Apart from the busy work of figuring out who bothers me most, I’ve been considering the temperature at which drinking whisky becomes unacceptable. Unthinkable, even. As much as I love it, it’s not a great hot weather tipple. I rarely touch it in Key West. Whisky warms from the inside. When it’s too warm outside, or inside, you can feel your skin getting flush and the beads of sweat rising to your temples after a sip or two. And because much of the point of whisky is its warmth, it is as though you’re drinking some kind of distillation of the discomforting climate around you. It just isn’t right.

There’s something about the combination of whisky and heat that brings to mind early/mid twentieth century British ex-pats propping up bars in hot places, rigidly dressing as though they were still in Blighty, slow ceiling fans giving no relief to relentless swelter, sweating through their collared shirts into their suit jackets, their faces sunburnt and ruddy all at once. Sweat stings their bloodshot eyes as they drink warm whisky and soda and refuse ice because “that’s for Americans”.

Drinking whisky when it’s too hot out feels like an exercise in denying reality. The act of throwing in a few ice cubes in it is sort of like watching your favourite movie in the back of an old 747 on a bumpy flight. It’s the same but less fun. So I resign myself to taking a wee break from my favourite tipple for a few days, possibly longer. As sacrifices go, you’d struggle to find a smaller one. Perhaps neck and neck with eschewing the AC for the less effective fan to cool my sauna of a room.

That British ex-pat in my mind’s eye, possibly the character from a Graham Greene novel, the one suffering the shitty ceiling fan and refusing ice for his Red Label or Black & White and soda, drenched in sweat, pink from the sun and red from the drink, I could see him in the pub today, kind of. Grumbling that it’s just summer. It’s just hot. It’s not a big deal. Why is everyone making such a fuss.

The older I get the more I realise that people openly wondering what all the fuss is about are not to be trusted. They hate fuss because it disturbs the mountain of privilege they sit upon. As someone prone to reclining on the odd hillock of privilege, I understand the desire, but sadly it operates on the presumption that everything was fine in the first place. And that’s just nonsense. Everything wasn’t fine in the first place. And everything certainly isn’t fine now. For fuck’s sake, it’s almost too hot drink whisky.

...to remember it now...

Most mornings I open a knackered green Moleskine notebook and attempt to transcribe my scrawls about whisky. I’m grateful for the ribbon that marks my page but I struggle to find the correct bit on that page amidst the scribbles and angrily crossed out misspellings. It’s mostly written in biro, though the odd felt tip makes an appearance.

I’ve never written anything so long in longhand before. It was an experiment. I enjoyed it, in parts, but don’t know if I’ll do it again.

I appreciate the battered pages, that unique dent a fine point pen makes, creating texture that is at once familiar and mysterious to the touch. I can close my eyes and run my fingers along the sheets and know there are words there, even if I don’t recall what they say.

Typing out these thoughts and stories and ravings has become a journey in itself. Remembering not just the stories, but writing those stories for the first time. Sometimes it’s so clear. I might remember where I was when I jotted down a tale about the midges on Loch Indaal in August 2013, bathed in the golden light of the waning sun and drinking Bunnahabhain with a champagne chaser (I was in an airport bar on my way to France to make wine for the 2020 harvest). Or sitting on a chair in a garden on the Thames and trying to describe hosting my first whisky tasting, illegally, in a dorm room at high school when I was 16. Or just sitting at my desk trying to in vain to properly explain how important a whisky Ardbeg 17yo has been in my life.

Sometimes both the writing and the words feel like they are the work of someone else. Someone kind of like me, but not me. I see my handwriting and know the story but it’s not how I would have told it and yet it’s there, in black or blue ink, and I apparently told it like that when I knew only myself would be the reader. There’s no rhyme or reason to these discrepancies of memory. Some stories that feel they should have been vivid when I wrote them seem distant. Others I can smell not only the drams from the time, but also the one I sipped when I wrote it down.

I sipped quite a few drams while writing it down.

I transcribe a few pages every morning before coffee or running or work. Originally, I was going to edit and rewrite as I transcribed, but I feel getting everything digital first is for the best, especially as I’m trying to do it before coffee or running and I can’t really trust any decisions made before those things. Perhaps before one or the other, but not both.

It’s taken me some time to realise that transcribing is not scratching the writing itch. I will tick the box that I’ve worked on the book, so that’s a manner of writing task, but it’s not writing. It’s copying. With a bit of palaeography thrown in (my handwriting isn’t terrible, but it isn’t great either). So coming back here and blathering on about it has been good. But I’ve also started writing notes again, proper notes in a notebook. Though you’d think I was a bit over the whole notebook thing by now, I’m just over the whole handwriting the WHOLE BOOK thing now. I think taking notes for books in longhand is great and would actually be perfect if I could remember which notebook I took the notes in.

Next to my desk is a stack of eight completed notebooks. Some are tasting notes, some are journals, some are a mixture of the two. They cover fiction, non-fiction, thoughts, poetry… they all go back to 2005. There are more elsewhere. These are just the ones I put next to my desk because I thought they were the most urgent. They don’t include the whisky book manuscript. That’s another one. There are a couple of Smythsons (super posh), several Moleskines, and in-between a Field Notes or two. For every notebook that’s full I have three or four untouched kicking about. Perhaps more.

I love buying notebooks.

Imagining all the writing I’m going to do is so much easier than writing it.

everything that's happened since

I've written a whole book since the last time I was on here. Not sure how I managed that, or how I managed to not pour forth on here about the daily hiccups and constant torrents of self-doubt that accompany that particular endeavour. Previous attempts at book-writing accumulated another book's worth of blog posts; meandering missives concerned with the curious space writers occupy. It could be limbo, but perhaps it's more that limbo is the ideal, the space I search for when I'm writing. An in-between space occupied by only me, a part of the world and apart from it. In contact enough to sip a whisky and see the odd friend, but outside so that nothing can exist but the sound of my fingers banging on the keys to Dvořák's 9th. It works as an ideal to aim for, rather than something to expect. Anyway, I wrote it, limbo or not, and I'm rewriting it now. I like the characters more than the book, so the rewrites are to make sure they get the book they deserve. It's slow, but sort of steady. 

Also, through no fault of my own, I appear to be a wine merchant again. In a shop. With wine. And whisky. I missed whisky. Well, I missed constantly dealing with whisky on a professional level. I was never really far enough away from it on a casual level to actually *miss* it. There are thirteen bottles next to my desk and a glass of Springbank next to my trackpad for goodness' sake. Anyway, it's a job with great booze. I will not be talking about it much here. 

There's another manuscript to rewrite, an old one. The first novel I wrote, the one that got me writing in the first place, that is going to need a hefty rewrite as well. Fortunately, my editor doesn't get their mitts on it until October, so I've got time to rewrite the other one first. Hopefully. That book is published next year. You can still get your name in it, if you fancy.  

I've drunk well, eaten well, and run a lot. I've come up with a name for my wine label. It's Cathar(tic) Wines, if you're at all interested. They are not yet available in a discerning independent wine merchant near you. They may never be. There aren't many bottles to be honest, and I'm pretty sure my mum is going to drink most of them. The name's a mediaeval history joke, if you need any further proof that I'm an incurable nerd. I like having a wine label. It's only taken a decade, which is less time than getting my first novel published, but more time than publishing my first wine book.

Other than that, the summer is kind of a blur. Some lovely friends got married, though that was May. Some other friends had parties and others drank on weather beaten picnic tables outside pubs. I tried to get to get to Scotland but couldn't, so I drank a bit more whisky than summer usually suggests and Scotland came to me. 

Someone died that shouldn't have. Who I'd not seen in too long but was so strong a presence in a time and part of my life that still feels and tastes so fresh that it could have been five minutes ago. I can hear her laughing and fighting and shouting with glee and she's not there anymore and while I know that I'm supposed to celebrate her having been there at all, I'm still angry and sad that so bright a life and talent is gone. She drove a red Honda Jazz (when I knew her) and painted horses and liked wine. I disagreed with some of her politics, but liked the way she fought for them. I'm ashamed that whenever I thought, "I've not seen or spoken to her in awhile" I just assumed it would be something time would correct, that we would meet again because that's what people do. But she's gone now and it doesn't seem real.