Raw Spirit by Iain Banks Page B

arrow slits set into them, so you can just look and see whether the stuff’s boiling away nicely, not boiling hard enough (more heat required) or about to boil over and make a mess of the heat exchanger (less heat needed), but back in the old days, before this hi-tech glass nonsense, they’d just swing a wee wooden ball against the copper and work out from the dullness or otherwise of the resulting
Dong
whether their liquid was simmering anaemically, frothing nicely or about to blow the place up.
    There is even a suggestion that all this whacking away at the copper stills with wooden balls might have led to the stills starting to get a bit dented, taking on the appearance of coppery golf balls, and that this might contribute to the character of the resulting whisky. Hmm, I say. (There is real, probably daft, pointlessly conservative and very superstitious stuff going on here; some distillers really do insist that when coppersmiths replace an old still – they only last about fifteen years or so with all that heating and bubbling, even with repairs and riveted-on patches – they deliberately make exact replicas of the old stills, down to the dents they received accidentally, and even down to the patches and repairs themselves … But hold on; what about the way the whisky they made tasted
before
they had the patches? And are these patches cumulative? Do they all add? Will future copies of these stills be so accreted with patches summed from all their many generations of ancestors that they look like patchwork quilts but in copper?)
    Oh well; who knows and never mind. Following a very pleasant look round the distillery, the hotel across the road and the wee village of Craighouse – all resplendent in the sunshine – we stock up on a few snacking supplies at the village shop and head off to see Orwell’s old place.
    After a little negotiation – there is a locked chain guarding the last few miles of the road, and permission to proceed beyond is far from automatic – we take the rocky road to Barnhill, where George Orwell wrote
1984
. Five deserted, dwelling-free miles of sheer vehicle torture ending in a gentle, shallow glen of rock and heather, stunted trees and newly flowered whin, the rich yellow blossom yet to exhale the buttery coconut scent of early summer. The old, white-painted house forms a shallow U-shape when you include the one-time byres and stables on either side. (The track winds on over the hill to one last house further north, the final outpost of humanity before the Corryvrecken.)
    We are greeted by two honkily suspicious geese – possibly the remains of a flock that was here in Orwell’s time – and a view down across the unkempt remains of garden and lawn over a slope-damp meadow of reed and coarse grass to the still bare trees above the rocks and the shining curve of bay. The rugged shore of mainland Argyll lies in the distance under the haze, more an implication than a presence.
    George Orwell – Eric Blair, as he was born – came here to write, not die. I had the impression, before reading the latest biography,
Orwell
, by D. J. Taylor, that he’d slunk here like some wounded animal dragging itself off to breathe its last, but this was not really what happened, and nor was Orwell as alone as I’d thought, either. Orwell knew he was unwell, even if he was loath to admit to his friends that he might be suffering from tuberculosis, but the diagnosis was made after he’d come back to Jura following an earlier stay at Barnhill and a subsequent return to London.
    There was a stigma to tuberculosis at the time; people knew it was infectious, and I’d thought that Orwell had exiled himself to a determined solitude which even then, when Jura had a few more inhabitants and the road was better (… surely. I mean, he drove a motorbike down
this
? With lungs close to collapse and haemorrhage?), must have been close to complete. The air was purer than anything in the cities – though, given that