they malverned me

It was our fifteenth wedding anniversary last week (crystal, since you ask); various family commitments meant that we could only get away for a night and most of a day but that did afford an opportunity to do some walking in the Malvern Hills, somewhere I'd never been. 

Any walk in the Malverns will be constrained by the shape of the terrain, a distinctive north-south spine of rock poking out of the otherwise pretty flat ground. In particular, that topography makes it difficult to construct a satisfactory circular walk without either following an essentially out-and-back route (i.e. traversing the ridge twice) or incurring a lot of low-level walking at one end of the walk or the other. Conversely, organising a one-way end-to-end traverse of the ridge involves either two cars, or a reliance on public transport of some sort.

In addition to all that, if the aim of your walk is to walk the full length of the ridge, staying on top of it as much as possible, you have to decide how much of a purist/completist attitude you're going to take (this will additionally be constrained by what the people with you are prepared to put up with). So we could have done what this guy did and walk the entire ridge from its low-level start down at the southern end at Chase End Hill, but that would have involved some logistical shenanigans that we couldn't really be arsed with, plus an early start that we equally couldn't be arsed with, considering part of the point of the trip was to have a nice night away, dinner, a few drinks and not have to get up at some absurd hour.

A brief interlude for some accommodation details, then: we stayed in Colwall, largely for reasons of navigational and logistical convenience, but it happens also to be a nice little village with, crucially, a railway station (we'll come back to this later) and also the Colwall Park Hotel, a nice little country pub/hotel with pretty decent food and excellent Butty Bach which I took the opportunity of having a few of with dinner.

So we got up the following morning, moved the car fifty yards down the road to the railway station car park, and then headed off over the station footbridge and in a generally southerly direction. Basically the choice of Colwall as start point meant that there was a bit of a walk in to get to our chosen access point to the ridge - as you can see from the route map below this results in the walk being shaped like a wobbly letter J with Colwall at the bent end. 

So we cracked on up to the summit of Herefordshire Beacon at 338 metres (1109 feet), which seemed like a satisfying southerly point, all the minor hills to the south of it being lower. This is also known as British Camp, that technically being the name of the Iron Age earthwork that occupies its upper slopes. This first bit is an up-and-back trip from the British Camp car park, which is less satisfactory than a nice neat loop but did provide an opportunity on coming back down to pop into the imaginatively-named Malvern Hills Hotel for a refreshing beverage and a toilet stop before tackling the main ridge. 

Once on the main ridge there is, as with all ridge walks, a bit more up and down than you might expect, but it is in general a delight with (thanks to the flatness of most of the surrounding terrain) spectacular views all the way over to the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons and beyond. Named summits that we passed over during this section of the walk were Black Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Jubilee Hill and Perseverance Hill, all really just the tops of gentle undulations in the ridge rather than magnificent craggy peaks in their own right. 

There's another pronounced dip known as Wyche Cutting (at least partly man-made, I think) before the last and highest section of the walk; this handily contains another pub where we repeated the pint-and-a-piss routine from earlier. And then it was off up Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the day at 425 metres (1394 feet), and a few more subsidiary hills (Summer Hill, North Hill, End Hill), before dropping down into the northern end of Great Malvern and making our way to the railway station at Malvern Link, but not before a celebratory pint at the Bakery Inn. Refreshed, we then caught a train from Malvern Link to Colwall (two stops, less than ten minutes), picked up the car and headed back home. 

These are definitely hills rather than mountains, but (if you're lucky enough to have a glorious clear sunny day as we did) the magnificence of the views compares favourably with much higher summits, and it's a satisfying walk of almost exactly ten miles which you'll notice conforms to a couple of my informal rules: the low-level walk just to get to where you need to be is at the start rather than the end, and the main focus of the day (the highest point, invariably) is somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way round. 

aber bit of this

All right, let's do a quick whisky post. Wife and one child are away and I've got a quiet evening at home so what better way to cap it off than by using writing a blog post as an excuse for a whopping slug of distilled spirit.

This particular distilled spirit is from the Aber Falls distillery, right here in God's own country, Wales, albeit about as far from my home city of Newport as you can get without being in an entirely different country, or perhaps the sea. The distillery is in Abergwyngregyn and takes its name from a waterfall a couple of miles to the north, in the foothills of the Carneddau range on the edge of Eryri/Snowdonia. I personally have no strong feelings, incidentally, about whether you say Eryri or Snowdonia, just as I have no strong feelings about whether you say Brecon Beacons or Bannau Brycheiniog, and I guarantee no-one else does either despite the many column inches of manufactroversy that have been expended on the matter. 

You'll recall, of course, our visit to the Penderyn distillery in the foothills of the Brecon Beacons (or Bannau Brycheiniog; again, take your pick) back in 2010 following my purchase and consumption of a bottle the previous year. The Penderyn distillery was founded in 2000; the Aber Falls distillery is quite a bit newer with production starting in 2018. 

Anyway, I acquired this bottle as part of a gratifying haul of whisky at Christmas and my birthday - I've got the extended family pretty well trained now and it's almost exclusively books and whisky, the occasional rogue pair of socks aside.

It's not dissimilar to the Penderyn, actually; pale, evidently quite young, slightly more sweet and mellow and biscuity and slightly less pungently magic marker-y. It's been a while since I've drunk any Penderyn but I think if my memory of that is accurate then I like this one better. For all my tedious enthusiasm for all things Welsh, though, if you were to ask me whether this competes with some of the Scotch whiskies in a similar price bracket like, say, the entry-level Highland Park or Johnnie Walker Black Label, I would have to say: no, not really. 

leanston, meanston, deanston

Better do this whisky post before the bottle disappears - a very real danger as it's the only one in the cupboard at the moment. The brief glory days of immediately post-birthday (supplemented by the Christmas backlog) have long since been whittled away and we're into the long dark teatime of the soul that precedes Christmas 2025 and hopefully a bit of a bump in the stocks.

Anyway, this is Deanston, not one that you see in supermarkets a lot, although I seem to remember Marks & Spencer used to sell it. I happened to see it on the spesh for about £25 on Amazon a while back so I decided to snap it up; I mean, why not, right?

Deanston distillery is located a few miles west of Dunblane, fairly southerly as Highland distilleries go though not as far south as Glengoyne. It's a fairly young distillery, being opened in 1965, but inhabits a set of buildings with an interesting history which were used as a cotton mill for around 200 years before being re-purposed for whisky production. 

This is the entry-level Virgin Oak expression, the name referencing the year or so the whisky spends in new oak casks which have never before held any spirit. This alone would not qualify the spirit to be called Scotch whisky, as it must first be matured for at least three years in casks that have previously held some other spirit; in this case American bourbon. So you might say, well, this whole Virgin Oak thing sounds like a bit of a gimmick then, and I'd say, yes, you may be right there. In their defence it is bottled at a beefy 46.3% which represents some commitment to delivering a bit of oomph at the cost of wringing out a bit of extra profit. It would be easy enough, after all, to just dilute the whole thing down to the standard 40% and squeeze out roughly an extra bottle for every seven or so bottles at 46.3%, so respect to them for not doing that. They also make a big thing on the packaging of it being non-chill-filtered, and there are no cryptic messages in foreign languages which denote the inclusion of extra colouring. There is, as it happens, a slightly complex relationship between chill-filtering and the bottling strength of your whisky which I won't attempt to explain but which you can read about here.

All that don't amount to a hill of beans if your whisky tastes like donkey ass, though, in fact slightly more concentrated donkey ass might even be a bad thing. No worries on that particular score, though. I mean it's not especially startling, adhering to the present-day standard of being a no-age-statement whisky sitting below the 12-year-old which they are thereby able to charge more money for and which I don't deem myself able to afford what with having kids to feed and all that malarkey.

But, to be fair, there's nothing wrong with it, any more than there's anything wrong with a whole host of unpeated Highland and Speyside whiskies that I'd struggle to tell apart in a blind taste test. I'd put this in the top half of the imaginary chart, because it's got some nice dried-fruit spiciness going on. A sploosh of water doesn't hurt here, especially since the higher bottling strength means it won't damp the aforementioned oomph down too much.

celebrity lookeylikey of the day

Today's pair are author Harlan Coben and actor, author, amateur chef and mixologist Stanley Tucci.

The only Harlan Coben book I have ever read is Tell No One, which I read a copy of owned by my then-girlfriend shortly after its 2001 publication in a desperate holiday running-out-of-books frenzy, something I would obviously never allow to happen nowadays. I would describe it as enjoyable, gripping and utterly ludicrous, which is all absolutely fine for a fairly pulpy thriller. Like many primarily plot-driven things it and its many successors in Coben's oeuvre are prime material for film and TV adaptations, and sure enough there have been a whole raft of them, most recently the Netflix series adapted from Run Away, which seems to feature a cast of mainly British actors.

Stanley Tucci, meanwhile, is probably right now deep in some method-acting preparation for the plum role of me in the movie of my life. For him to be a perfect fit appearance-wise I probably need to get slightly balder, something which I'm pretty sure will happen all too imminently. 

did an icebreaker at a work meeting the other day where the question was "who would play you in a movie of your life". panicked slightly trying to think of bespectacled bald fiftysomethings and said Stanley Tucci. increasingly convinced of the genius of the idea

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 17, 2023

scotial media

Christmas is coming up, as you know, and one of the things that I like to look forward at Christmastime, in addition to all the heartwarming tree-hugging hippie crap like hanging out with family, world peace, goodwill to all men and all that malarkey, is the acquisition of some mind-expanding books and some equally mind-expanding whisky. Same goes for my birthday a couple of short months later, which is great but means that after that short-term bonanza of gift-receiving between December and February there is a ten-month period when I am theoretically expected to survive on what I've been given until the next Christmas rolls around. Now I am a man of some grit and willpower but that may not be possible. Not so much with the books, where I have a substantial backlog beyond what I may be gifted each year, and where top-ups can be had in selected second-hand outlets for only a couple of quid, but definitely with the whisky. I don't drink (burp) a massive amount of it, but this year, like a few other previous years, I found myself exhausting the last of the bottles in around October. 

So in these circumstances you either limp on to Christmas on just beer and wine and the occasional schooner of creme de menthe from the back of the cupboard, or you keep an eye out for bargain purchases in supermarkets. And just occasionally you will stumble across something unusual and interesting, as I did when I was in (I think) Sainsbury's the other week: a bottle of Glen Scotia for around 25 quid. But why is this unusual and interesting? Well, two different questions, really: unusual because I don't think I've seen whisky from this distillery in a supermarket before, interesting because Glen Scotia is one of only three remaining distilleries in the Campbeltown region of Scotland. That region comprises the geographical area around the town of - you've guessed it - Campbeltown on the Mull of Kintyre. This used to be a massive centre for whisky production, but, a bit like the Lowland region, has dwindled to only a handful of distilleries. Confusingly these three distilleries put out between them five different single malts: Glen Scotia puts out, as you might expect, Glen Scotia, Glengyle puts out Kilkerran (eh, it's a long story) and Springbank puts out not only (as you might expect) Springbank, but also Hazelburn and Longrow. 

I've never seen any of those others on supermarket shelves, but here's Glen Scotia, large as life and bearing the name Campbeltown Harbour. This is pretty standard stuff for many entry-level single malts these days - bump the formerly entry-level 10-year-old up to the first of the premium slots (with a corresponding increase in price, of course) and slide in a no-age-statement cheapo version into the economy slot with some bullshit name - see also Glenlivet Founder's Reserve, Bowmore Legend, Talisker Skye and many others. 

There is another bit of blurb on the box which purports to be some tasting notes from their master distiller and says "sea spray and gentle smoke". I don't want to argue with the master distiller, and it could be just because I've had a cold for the last week or so, but I don't get much of either of those things, gentle or otherwise. What I get is some perfectly nice but not massively memorable whisky-flavoured liquid, not dissimilar to various other whiskies produced in the Highland and Lowland regions to which Campeltown is adjacent. There's perhaps just a hint of something a bit darker and Marmite-y of the sort that you get with, say, Tobermory. Maybe that's the "sea" thing coming through, or maybe that's just bollocks. Who knows?

There's not really a great deal else to add here except a word about water: I used to be a bit sniffy about the addition of water to whisky but I'm persuaded that in some cases (richly flavoured and/or peated whiskies, or those bottled at an ABV above the standard 40%) a sploosh can be nice and open things up a bit flavour-wise. For something a bit more delicate like the Glen Scotia I think a sploosh knocks the stuffing out of it and you're better sticking with neat. But, hey, if you've paid for it you can drink it how you like, indeed you may cram it up your ass if you so wish. 

cache for questions

Here's a map of a short walk we did with some friends when we went up to Leicestershire to visit them for New Year. We had, collectively, five kids with us, so a twenty-mile route march was out and in any case would have cut unacceptably into drinking time. We ended up performing a slightly complex set of manouevres involving a car in order to ensure that smaller people who didn't want to do the whole walk and might potentially get a bit whingy and risk PISSING ME OFF had an opt-out and in the end it was only three of us (me, Jim and Nia) who did the whole route (around five miles) on foot. 

No claim will be made by me here that this was the most exciting or challenging walk ever, therefore, but I offer it up nonetheless to illustrate that if you're interested in what goes on around you you can find quite a bit to interest and intrigue even on a short, low-level walk such as this.

Start and end point was at our friends' house in Stathern, which I have obfuscated the exact location of just in case anyone decides to go and burgle it. We then walked along the road towards the neighbouring village of Harby before heading north just after the old railway bridge and linking up with the towpath of a disused canal before making our way into Harby, where we had a couple of pints in the pub and then headed back via the more direct on-road route.

Some points of interest along the way: firstly the old railway bridge and the railway it used to carry. This was the slightly cumbersomely-named Great Northern and London and North Western Joint Railway which meandered its way around Leicestershire in a mainly north-south direction. Its main business was goods but there were passenger services (ending pre-Beeching in 1953), and there was a station serving both villages called, imaginatively, Harby and Stathern, whose approximate location is marked by the purple star on the map. As with any station designed to serve two communities, it was roughly equidistant from each and conveniently accessible from neither. 

As if that were not interesting enough, Nia reminded me to have a look at my geocaching app and see if there was anything in the vicinity. I discovered not only that there was, but that there was one right under the railway bridge - cue a lot of scrambling around until we eventually found it under a log by the side of the northern bridge abutment.

I see I've mentioned geocaching a few times on Twitter before but the only mention on this blog seems to be in this post from 2008 wherein I was a bit sniffy about it. Well, all I can say is that was pre-kids and it's a lot of fun hunting them out with the kids and gives them a little bit of extra impetus to agree to outdoor activities. The link earlier in this paragraph includes details of the app, of which there is a free version more than good enough to facilitate some entertaining hunting; give it a go. Top tip: take a pen with you as quite a lot of them have log books and only the really lavishly-appointed ones have an accompanying pen, still less one that works.

some more fun #geocaching up in #Wentwood woods at the weekend. Alys was very chuffed that her sharp eyes spotted this one before her sister did. also a bit weird that all the Wentwood geocaches have Papa Lazarou in them barking HELLO DAVE at me pic.twitter.com/1k14TDjjat

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) August 27, 2020

So then there's the canal - this is the old Grantham Canal which ran from, you've guessed it, Grantham, to West Bridgford on the southern outskirts of Nottingham (and where I went to school for a couple of years in the early 1980s - I mean, not in the canal specifically) where it joined the River Trent. It's pretty reedy and silty and overgrown these days though still just about recognisable as a waterway. 

Finally, once we'd squelched along the muddy towpath to Harby we called into the Nag's Head for a couple of reviving pints. They'd evidently done their research and knew we were coming, as they'd facilitated a nice home-from-home vibe by having Brains SA on tap, and very nice too. Needless to say we lingered a while longer then we'd originally planned, so when everyone else piled into the car to head home the remaining three of us had to stumble back along the road in the dark. Luckily the roadside verges were fairly wide and my phone flashlight was just about up to the job of helping us see where we were going and avoid getting killed by occasional speeding cars. While we're on the subject of pubs we also called into the Montero Lounge in Melton Mowbray on New Year's Day for lunch. 

Finally, my mention of Melton Mowbray there reminds me to remind you that if you're visiting the area you will be in the middle of both Melton Mowbray pork pie country and Stilton cheese country, so make sure you eat some. I'm not big on blue cheese but I did ensure I ate a pie while I was there. 

and I know that I am dying, and I wish I could beg

I find myself oddly uncomfortable with some of the fulsome tributes to Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, who died a couple of weeks ago. Not because he wasn't an exceptionally gifted songwriter and lyricist, nor because the Pogues didn't make some great albums, but because most of the tributes and obituaries either tiptoe around the elephant in the room or paradoxically embrace it.

We're into mildly contrarian HOT TAKE territory here, again, I suppose, so to go full devil's advocate I offer you the following opinion: MacGowan was a brilliant but troubled man - born, it should be noted, in Kent and sent to various quite posh fee-paying schools including Holmewood House and (briefly) Westminster before deciding to really embrace his ancestral Irishness - whose group, the Pogues, produced two unequivocally great albums, their second and third, 1985's Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and 1988's If I Should Fall From Grace With God. After that the quality dropped off markedly and after MacGowan's sacking by the rest of the band (for generally erratic and unreliable behaviour) in 1991 he produced nothing of any note creatively for the rest of his life, endured increasingly poor health including being confined to a wheelchair after an accident in 2015 and eventually died after bouts of viral encephalitis and pneumonia. 

The elephant in the room I referred to above is of course MacGowan's legendary drink and drug intake. I don't have any particular insight into the details but it's public knowledge that he had a heroin habit for some years; outside of that it seems to have been mainly The Drink. As has been noted a few times before, Irish culture in particular has a bit of a problem with The Drink and the associated romanticised notions of wild-eyed poetic types carousing till the small hours and having hilarious adventures with Paddy McGinty's horse et tediously cetera, ignoring the more prosaic tooth-rotting, soft-cocked, trouser-shitting realities of such behaviour. Is it possible to say that MacGowan's meaningful recording career would have encompassed more than a couple of albums if he hadn't degenerated into a mumbling toothless chair-bound alcoholic? No, but it might have stood a better chance, and the various obituaries that celebrate the drink intake as if it were some sort of essential adjunct to the creative process seem to be making some unwarranted and potentially dangerous assumptions. It's really the same question as could have been asked after Christopher Hitchens' demise some years back: would moderating the booze intake have made them worse at their job? Could it, in fact, have made them better? Even during MacGowan's lifetime, the series of journalists lining up to interview him, ignore his crippling cognitive decline and project some sort of poetic fantasy onto the blank canvas of the monosyllabic answers and incomprehensible cackling they actually got on tape was, eh, I dunno: unhelpful, let's say. 

There's a fine line to be trodden here, and I recognise the danger of getting into the whole "I like a drink, you are a bon viveur, he is an alcoholic" thing, or, to put it another way, it ill behooves someone (like me) very partial to a beverage to be pontificating too snootily about someone else's intake. But I would tentatively suggest it's about contrast: there's no better pint than the one you have at the end of a long strenuous mountain hike on a hot day, for instance. Cut out the contrast so that the drink bit is all you do and you lose a significant part of the point of the whole thing; then again that's what makes hopeless uncontrollable alcoholics hopeless uncontrollable alcoholics, I suppose. There is also an element in the various tributes of heeeeeeyyy whaddaya gonna do, he's Irish, which is of course a bit racist.

There is another elephant lurking about here, and it's this: when you read about some 63-stone teenager whose daily intake of grub comprises a gallon of Ben & Jerry's and forty-two pizzas, you have to ask: look, we've gone well past the stage where they could be walking down the pizza shop themselves to get hold of this stuff, and yes, conceivably they could be phoning out for it (although someone's still got to get up and answer the door), but generally there is an enabler in the mix somewhere. In the case of morbidly obese teenagers it's generally a parent, in MacGowan's case it was pretty clearly his long-time girlfriend and latterly wife Victoria Mary Clarke, who you might charitably describe as endearingly scatty and unconventional, or less charitably as simply bonkers. Either way she was clearly devoted to MacGowan in a probably counter-productive way.

And then, finally, there's Fairytale Of New York. A fine song, no doubt (co-written by MacGowan and fellow Pogue Jem Finer) but somewhat overdone these days, and the melodic motif that features in the song and repeatedly in the lengthy outro is surely partly nicked from John Denver's Annie's Song. And despite all the "lying there almost dead on that drip in that bed" stuff there is just a suspicion of some romanticising of the whole drunken bum thing. That said, it's still better than Mistletoe And Wine, which I'll wager was written and recorded entirely sober, except of course for a certain amount of intoxication induced by OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. Makes you think, dunnit.

mein drampf

Here is the whisky news. And the whisky news is: I've run out of whisky! Yes, the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that I've been eking modest dramlets from for a few months has finally bitten the dust, and the cupboard is now officially bare - well, bare of whisky anyway; there's still some coconut rum, some Austrian schnapps in a bottle shaped like a violin and a miniature bottle of Amarula that's almost certainly just yellow dust by now.

Don't panic, though, because Sainsbury's have a few Nectar card offers on, including this bottle of Tullibardine, which I snapped up, partly because it's a distillery that has never featured in this list, though I see I did mention it here in the context of Andy having had some in his whisky cupboard. That was 13 years ago so I'm going to guess it's not there any more. 

Tullibardine has had an interesting history despite being founded as recently as 1949 - mothballed in 1995, it was revived in 2003 and offers, as many distilleries do these days, a bewildering variety of different finishes. The one I have here is the entry-level one, called Sovereign for no readily apparent reason, and finished in the relatively orthodox surroundings of ex-bourbon casks. 

The distillery is in Blackford, just down the road from the Gleneagles hotel and golf complex, so it's in the Highland region. That doesn't of itself tell you much about what to expect as there's a wide variation in the region from the smoky delights of Ardmore to the rich cakey goodness of Clynelish and Dalmore, Ben Nevis and Oban on the west coast and the lighter stuff like Glenmorangie and Glengoyne. 

As it happens if you didn't know better you might assume this was a generic Speysider very much in the vein of many previous featurees here like Tomatin, Speyburn, Knockando and Glenlivet. It's quite pale (no cryptic foreign-language disclaimers here), with the usual whiff of magic markers (like most no-age-statement varieties there's probably some quite young whisky in it) but also some marzipan and just a suspicion of something a bit vegetable-y; nothing on the scale of the Tobermory, though. 

Have a taste and it's slightly less sweet than you might expect but otherwise not much out of the ordinary going on; it's a very pleasant sipping whisky but it's not going to blow your socks off.

One odd thing you might notice is the heavy featuring of the number 1488 on the packaging and indeed on the distillery building itself. This is intended to be a reference to the visit of James IV of Scotland to the site (a brewery at the time) in that year, presumably to get a few tinnies in for a weekend with the boys. A couple of related comments: firstly this is a bit of claiming association with some largely unrelated historical date that's even more cheeky than the Loch Lomond one, secondly that number is famous in internet circles for having other connotations, connotations that you might decide you didn't want any chance of your product being tainted by association with. Put it another way, if you meet someone with a prominent "1488" tattoo somewhere on their body, it probably doesn't denote their enthusiasm for Tullibardine whisky and approaching with caution might be advisable.

nip nip moray

A couple of whisky items in the cupboard to catch up on - I had a gratifying number of bottles for Christmas and my birthday, as I often do, and what then generally follows is me trying (usually unsuccessfully) to eke out the (relatively) lavish late-February whisky situation for the rest of the year. I think you would have to say that last year's selection probably included some more interesting stuff, or at least more stuff that I hadn't tried before, but there were a couple of new ones here, and I present them here for your perusal and edification.

Firstly, here's a Glen Moray. We've had one of these before but that one was a special edition finished in Chardonnay casks (but actually a good deal better than that makes it sound). This one, though labelled Elgin Classic, seems to be just the bog-standard edition and as such is very cheap in most supermarkets (typically around £20). The distillery is situated just outside the town of Elgin, smack dab in the middle of the Speyside region, on the banks of the River Lossie. A couple of things to note about that, firstly that Glenlossie might have been a more obvious name but by the time the Glen Moray distillery was founded in 1897 that name had already been taken. Secondly, while most Speyside whiskies take their water from rivers and streams that flow into the River Spey, it's not a condition of being a Speyside whisky (as I lazily implied it was here) - the Lossie flows directly into the sea at Lossiemouth.

Secondly, here's a bottle of Bunnahabhain Stiùireadair, which despite its fancy name (which means something like "helmsman" in Scots Gaelic) is the no-age-statement entry-level Bunnahabhain, enabling them, one might cynically say, to bump up the price of the 12-year-old version. Bunnahabhain hasn't featured on this blog before as you don't see it in supermarkets all that often, but it did get a mention here alongside the Allt-a-bhainne with which it shares some etymological roots. Coincidentally, while the Allt-a-bhainne makes much mileage out of its being unusual among Speyside whiskies in being lightly peated, Bunnahabhain's USP has always been that it's an Islay malt but (special editions aside) unpeated.

As with many coastal whiskies including Old Pulteney and Aerstone the claim is made here for a "brackish" or "briny" or "salty" tang to the whisky, a claim I expressed some mild scepticism about here, and the reviewer here expresses a similar slightly eye-rolling scepticism about as well. I think what he's basically saying is: if this is salty, I'm a Dutchman.

Anyway, let's get in there. The Glen Moray has the classic no-age-statement whisky thing of a big heady solvent-y whack of pear drops and magic markers when you have a sniff, and it's hard to penetrate to any actual whisky smells under that. That stuff all falls away when you have a taste, leaving only a bit of "hotness" that presumably derives from the young age of the whisky, and a general unthreatening Speysidiness that we've seen before in everything from the Tormore to the Tomatin. It's perfectly nice but relatively unmemorable and there are probably several things in a similar price bracket that would give you more bang for your buck. I mean, I know it's a single malt and all, but if you were to ask me if it compares to something like Johnnie Walker Black Label at a very similar price, I would say: no, not at all. 

The Bunnahabhain is pretty similar when you stick your nose in the glass: if anything at a robustly artisanal 46.3% (the Glen Moray is a bog-standard 40%) it's even more forbiddingly reminiscent of nail polish remover, though there is perhaps just a hint of something sweet and woody underneath. A different story when you have a taste, though, as there is a bit more depth here, with something a little bit earthy and vegetable-y underneath. As with a lot of whiskies at around the 46% mark this is one that might benefit from a splosh of water to open it up a bit.

Anyway, it's interesting from a purely academic standpoint as an unpeated Islay malt - unique as a standard offering though Caol Ila for one do occasionally knock out an unpeated malt as a special edition - and if you want a winner from this particular head-to-head match-up the Bunnahabhain would definitely be it. Both featurees here are a little polite for my taste, though. 

a phosphate worse than death

Every day, as I was saying only recently on Twitter, is a school day. And so I'd like to share with you a thing I learnt today as some sort of improving moral fable and a salutary lesson on the perils of assuming things, because if you do that you will, as I'm sure you're aware (at least I assume you are), make an ASS out of U and ME.

Anyway, you'll all be familiar with Trout Mask Replica, the seminal musical achievement of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, indeed I expect you spin that baby up once a week for the whole family to enjoy. Among the singalong pop nuggets on the album (released in 1969) is a song called Orange Claw Hammer, delivered a cappella in its album version. It's, erm, an acquired taste, which is partly why this version, supposedly from a radio broadcast in about 1973 and supposedly featuring Frank Zappa on acoustic guitar, is such a revelation, resembling, as one of the YouTube commenters says, a "psychotic sea shanty". It is genuinely, unironically, great, and the lyrics do make a crazy sort of sense, while still being fairly bonkers.

One of the things that I assumed was a bit of trademark Beefheartian wordplay was this bit:

Come, little one, with your little old dimpled fingers
Gimme one and I'll buy you a cherry phosphate

"Cherry phosphate", hahaha, I thought - classic Beefheart, juxtaposing fruity innocence with harsh incongruous chemistry to produce an arresting image while being literally physically impossible and/or poisonous if anyone ever actually attempted it.

I can't remember how I came across the link to this article that reveals that not only was a cherry phosphate an actual thing, but that phosphate drinks more generally were a popular item in post-war America. That link contains some instructions for extracting additional flavourings from cherry bark, with the reassurance that in the resulting brew "the amount of hydrogen cyanide produced is minuscule", which is about as reassuring as learning that cheap red wine contains only a relatively modest amount of arsenic. Basically what these drinks had in common was the use of acid phosphate (a solution of phosphoric acid with some mineral salts added) as an acidifying agent in place of, say, lemon or lime juice. You can still get it in certain niche outlets if you really want some. Similarly if you want to make an Ammonia Coke then you can still acquire the ingredients, though since I'm not partial to either ammonia or coke I'll be giving it a miss. 

running for president

A couple of follow-up observations on earlier posts:

Firstly, I notice that politicians continue to embarrass themselves by attempting to ingest mildly intoxicating grain-based fermented fluids through their facial orifices in a way approximating what actual normal human beings would do in similar circumstances. The pictures below of Zac Goldsmith and Boris Johnson during a promotional stunt for Goldsmith's toxic (and thankfully unsuccessful) 2016 campaign for London mayor are the perfect example of this: Goldsmith genuinely seems to have no idea how to hold a pint glass and his facial expression after a very tentative sip is that of someone taking their first ever sip of beer. I mean, I should add that I almost certainly made a very similar expression after my first ever taste of beer, but I took the precaution of being about twelve and not on camera at the time.

Boris Johnson has at least (assuming he started with a full pint) managed a respectable quaff, although his facial expression suggests at least the faint possibility of it coming straight back up again.

Anyway, the other thing that politicians do, now that youth and vibrancy are supposedly the desirable things in politicians rather than, say, competence, trustworthiness and an absolutely massive beard, is make a point of being photographed running. Obviously the most convenient time is when just leaving or, better still, just returning to your house, as then you can just skulk round the corner and, at the most opportune moment, arrive back at a sprint and go: oh, good morning, everyone, sorry, just been out for a run, hahaha, what, these old things? just my running gear, bit sweaty, hahaha, anyway, must get on, cheerio! Nothing will convince me that Michael Gove, to pick the most obvious example, actually moves his lower limb appendages rhythmically back and forth thus propelling his entire autonomous corporeal module along laterally at greater-than-average speed for any reason other than to provide the flimsy illusion of being an actual normal human being for the minimal amount of time necessary.

My first recollection of politicians doing this sort of thing was during Bill Clinton's presidency, though of course human beings of a degree of political celebrity have run before. But I think it's more prevalent now than it was, via David Cameron and his disturbing habit of making what I assume is his pig-fucking face while out running, to Boris Johnson and his absurd outfits. It's not just British politicians - Nicolas Sarkozy used to do it and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau is conspicuously sporty. I mean, fine, if that's genuinely your thing, but otherwise I think everyone should probably just Stop It.

Secondly, with reference to the recent-ish review of The Godfather and my reference therein to the bizarre episode with Lucy Mancini and her cavernous vagina, which I also mention here, it occurs to me that the canonical enormous vagina reference in fiction is its occurrence as a repeated theme in Jean M Auel's The Clan Of The Cave Bear and its sequels The Valley Of Horses and The Mammoth Hunters - there are three more books in the series but this is the point at which I got bored and drifted off to other things. 

The series' main protagonist, Ayla, has lots of exciting adventures, but a key plot thread is her desire to find a man who can fully occupy her, erm, cave, and, in parallel, the story of rugged hunter Jondalar and his desire to find a woman with whom he can, erm, sheath his spear in a full and satisfying way. I think one of the reasons I got bored with the books - which were big, doorstop-y tomes anyway - was the shift of focus away from the stuff about the rise of the Cro-Magnons (and the parallel demise of the Neanderthals) and towards a series of soap-opera-esque plot contrivances to force Ayla and Jondalar apart and back together again, complete with some furious spearing upon each reconciliation. It seems odd in hindsight, these being books I read as a teenager, to recall that I got bored because there was too much sex and not enough other stuff, but there it is.

soon may the bloggerman come

This seems at first glance like it fits into the lookeylikey category, but strictly it doesn't as I'm very confident these are literally the same people in two different (but thematically linked) contexts, and indeed locations.

Anyone who hangs out on Twitter for any length of time will be aware that trends come and go, things happen, literally everyone is talking about them, they mutate into memes that people copy, retweet, etc., then five minutes later they've been forgotten. Already in 2021 we've had Bean Dad Twitter, Tasing Himself In The Balls To Death While Doing A Terrorism Guy Twitter and now Sea Shanty Twitter. 

Those of us with a cultural connection to Wales will of course puff ruminatively on our pipe-stems (made out of a hollowed-out daffodil in the traditional manner) at this point and chuckle indulgently at the kids suddenly discovering the joys of close-harmony male voice singing, as this is something of a cultural fixture over here. And there is something rather magnificent about a group of Welshmen of a certain age, probably with a couple of fortifying pints of Mr. Brain's finest ale inside them, belting out Men of Harlech or something similar.

Anyway, while perusing one of the latest of the mashed-up multi-layered versions of Wellerman, the current undisputed number one Twitter sea shanty, I noticed that someone had tweeted a link to this rather splendid rendition of Bully In The Alley, a song in a very similar style ("bully" in this context is apparently one of the seemingly limitless collection of words that just means "drunk"). The thing that immediately grabbed my attention, apart from the barrel-chested magnificence of the guy leading the singing, was the white-bearded guy on the left of the line-up. I felt sure I'd seen him before. Here he is:

Fortunately I am blessed, or perhaps cursed, with a prodigious memory and I recalled almost immediately where it was. When it was was slightly more hazy, but a bit of searching through some old photos yielded this, taken in a shop doorway (presumably chosen for its pleasing acoustics) in Swanage in 2009. 

While the bearded guy on the right with the distinctive shorts and thumbs-in-pockets stance is clearly the guy on the left in the video, notice also how the guy next to him with the distinctive hairline and left-hand-on-ear pose is almost certainly the guy leading the song in the YouTube video. Just a minute there, Sherlock Columbo, you'll be saying, this is all a bit speculative; white-bearded guys in shorts and sandals and rotund types with their fingers in their ears must be ten a penny in folky circles. And I hear what you're saying, but a bit of research (including reading the text below the YouTube video) reveals that these guys are members of a folk troupe called Kimber's Men. If you look carefully at the contents of the open case at the bottom of the Swanage photo you'll see that these guys are offering CDs for sale, and, although the resolution is a bit sketchy, I think you will agree that the upright one is the one pictured here.

Further evidence is provided by the alternative rendition of Bully In The Alley delivered here - the bearded guy in the middle is pretty clearly the guy on the left in the Swanage photo. Just to be clear, this smaller group is Kimber's Men, the large group in the first YouTube video presumably being swelled by the presence of a load of other singers - it was apparently captured at the Deal Maritime Festival in September 2013. 

If you follow the link to the Kimber's Men website above you will note that the white-bearded guy is absent - this is apparently because he died in 2017. His name was Joe Stead and he was evidently something of a legend in folky circles. 

Traditional British folk music carries an unpalatable whiff of real ale and Morris dancing to most people (not that I am averse to the whiff of real ale, as you know) but it's something I like a lot, in carefully calibrated doses. To be honest the fact that it's a thing best enjoyed live in a slightly cramped and sweaty pub just adds to the attraction for me. The reason that Kimber's Men were hanging out in Swanage in the first place was because our visit in 2009 happened to coincide with the Swanage Folk Festival, and I cannot deny that among the many musical acts on display there was quite a bit of Morris dancing, most of it thankfully centred on the wide open areas on the seafront (the esplanade, if you will) rather than in the pubs. Pictures from that trip can be found here.

too much monkey business

Whisky round-up part two, as promised, if somewhat belatedly. Here are two whiskies very slightly (but only very slightly) more out of the ordinary than the two in the last post.

Firstly, Monkey Shoulder. This is actually an example of what's currently called a blended malt (formerly a "vatted malt"), i.e. it's a mixture of single malt whiskies from more than one distillery. These are not all that common and I think we've only featured a couple here before: the Shackleton a couple of years ago and Johnnie Walker Green Label waaaay back in 2011. The Monkey Shoulder website is heavy on visual bedazzlement and exhortations to make various tasty and exotic cocktails using their whisky, but correspondingly light on specifics about what's actually in it. I recall reading something when it first came out that said that it was a blend of whiskies from the three Dufftown distilleries owned by William Grant & Sons: Balvenie, Kininvie and Glenfiddich - apparently these days all they're prepared to commit themselves to is "various Speyside single malts". The name is a slightly cutesy reference to a sort of repetitive strain injury that malt shovellers would get.

Secondly, Allt-a-Bhainne, a relatively young distillery in Scotch whisky terms as it was opened in 1975, primarily as a supplier of whisky for the Chivas Regal blend. They also have a tremendously swooshy and colourful website, but one which fails to answer certain fundamental questions like: so what does Allt-a-Bhainne mean, then? and how are we meant to be pronouncing it? Fortunately Wikipedia and Google Translate both come to our rescue here: it means "milk-stream", and the "bh" is a "v" sound. Anyone who, like me, has tried to get their tongue round Munro names in the past will probably know this already. My original assumption that the Scots Gaelic "allt" (the bit that presumably means "milk") was related to the identically-spelt Welsh word, one of many which basically just means "hill", was evidently wrong. The "bhainne" bit also appears (in a slightly mutated form) at the end of the name of the Bunnahabhain distillery on Islay (Wikipedia says "The name Bunnahabhain is an anglicisation of Bun na h-Abhainne, Scottish Gaelic for Mouth of the River").

Anyway, Allt-a-Bhainne's USP is that, unusually for a Speysider, it is lightly peated. They've only fairly recently started marketing single malts as opposed to just piping everything into the big Chivas mixing vats. This is the basic no-age-statement version.

So, to work. The Monkey Shoulder is quite magic-marker and pear-drop-heavy when you take a sniff, but in an appealing sort of way. It is one of those whiskies where the smell promises sweetness and the taste delivers unexpected dryness, though, relatively at least. Like many of its predecessors this could pass for a perfectly quaffable Speysider largely indistinguishable from several other perfectly quaffable Speysiders.

The Allt-a-Bhainne, on the other hand, while not dissimilar to the nose, delivers just a little spike of peaty sharpness when you take a sip; not the full recently lit barbecue/unfavourable wind direction/scorched turf brick to the gizzard that you get with stuff like the Lagavulin or the Bowmore or the Laphroaig, but just enough to make it distinguishable from the aforementioned bog-standard Speysiders. I actually like this quite a lot; certainly if you want a recommendation from the four whiskies featured in the two most recent posts, this would be it.

it's 10pm and time to get speyed

Very belatedly - even more belatedly than last year, it turns out - here's the post-Christmas whisky round-up. I was lucky enough to get a good selection of stuff, including a few things I hadn't tried before alongside the old favourites like the Highland Park and the Johnnie Walker Black Label. There were four new ones, in fact, so what I'll do is compare them in pairs over two posts, to avoid either of the posts getting arse-numbingly long.

First up are Tomatin and Speyburn. Both solid, well-established distilleries that, coincidentally, were founded in the same year, 1897. Despite being only around 30 miles apart as the crow flies, the two distilleries are in different whisky regions, Speyburn being (as you'd expect from the name) in the Speyside region and Tomatin being in the Highland region. It's all about the water: despite the distilleries' geographical proximity the River Findhorn from which Tomatin takes its water finds its own way to the sea without being a tributary of the River Spey.

Back in the 1970s Tomatin was one of the biggest distilleries in the world, operating 20-odd stills (about the same number as Glenfiddich has today); things are somewhat reduced since then and it hasn't ever really been a big player in the single malt market. But here is Tomatin Legacy, conforming to what is the new standard for entry-level whisky by not carrying an age statement. Next one up in the range is a 12-year-old which will set you back an extra ten quid or so.

A quick scan of the box reveals no cryptic foreign text simultaneously announcing and concealing the presence of artificial colourants, so that's probably a good thing. It's quite a light golden colour, as befits something which claims to have been matured (for an unspecified amount of time) in ex-bourbon and virgin oak casks. There's a slightly "hot" estery magic marker whiff which is a hallmark of relatively young whisky - I should also add that this stuff is bottled at 43% so it's slightly "hotter" than some others purely by virtue of this.

Very few surprises when you drink it - slightly sweet, slightly biscuity, none of the corned beef and parsnips you get with some of the more wild and hairy-chested ones. Basically it's a perfectly quaffable dram which I would struggle to distinguish from a whole host of other non-peaty Speyside and Highland whiskies which have appeared on this blog; just from the recent-ish archives you've got Aberfeldy and Tamnavulin which would both fall into the same category.

Next up is the Speyburn: this one is 10 years old, though there is an entry-level no-age-statement one called Bradan Orach. So you can argue, if you like, that already we're not quite comparing apples with apples here, and I can (and will) say: bollocks.

Speyburn is guilty of having a slightly boring name; this isn't entirely its own fault, as it genuinely does reside on a burn that is a tributary of the Spey, and the obvious name making use of the name of the nearest town had already been bagged. It is nowhere near as rubbish, to be fair, as the new Speyside distillery which opened up in the 1980s and decided to call itself, after (presumably) literally minutes of brainstorming by the marketing team, *drum roll* The Speyside.

As you can see from the picture below, there's almost no difference in colour between the Tomatin (on the right) and the Speyburn; this is slightly surprising for no fewer than three reasons: firstly the Speyburn is older, which generally means darker, secondly it claims to have been at least partly matured in ex-sherry casks, which generally impart a darker colour, and thirdly the packaging carries the weaselly German and Danish disclaimers which denote the inclusion of a whack of caramel colouring.

There's very little to distinguish the two on having a sniff, either: big magic marker action, maybe just a hint of something a bit more meaty and interesting underneath, but you don't really get a significant difference until you have a sip, at which point you notice that the Speyburn is less sweet than the Tomatin. I mean, it's not exactly a chalk and cheese kind of thing, but there is at least a discernible difference.

Since there is barely a fag-paper of difference between them I'd struggle to express a firm preference for one or the other: on balance I'd probably go for the Speyburn just because there is a hint of slightly greater depth. But, you know, they're both perfectly fine if the polite end of the range is your thing. My preference remains for the west and north Highlanders and the non-Islay (no disrespect to Islay) Islanders.

wine based blogging

Here's another one for the Slightly Sinister Weird Shit Concealed By Seemingly Innocuous Labelling Practices files. I buy quite a lot of wine from Aldi, primarily, and I'm quite happy to admit this, because it is quite nice and, moreover, super-cheap. I'm not a big connoisseur of wine, still less a wine snob, but I do broadly know what I like, and highly quaffable South African Pinotage and Australian Shiraz for less than four quid a bottle are very much up my alley, thank you very much. The Chilean Merlot, if you can stretch to an extra ten pence, and aren't a bit funny about drinking Merlot, is pretty good too.

The bottle of Winking Owl red that we acquired the other day set my Spidey-sense a-tingling, though. Nothing obviously wrong with it, like being blue instead of red, or making me instantly go blind and have a rectal prolapse, and let's face it we've all had a bottle of wine that made that happen from time to time, amirite? No, it was more a general sense that it wasn't as nice as the other bottles that went for a similar price (this one was a smidgen under four quid). Not battery acid or anything, just a general impression that made me do that quizzical plap-plap-plap thing with the mouth and hold the glass up to the light in a suspicious manner.

Closer examination of the bottle revealed a couple of interesting things: firstly that the alcohol content was quite low at 10.5% (most New World wine clocks in around the 13% mark), and secondly that the assorted disclaimers and guidelines about responsible alcohol consumption limits and recycling on the label on the back of the bottle included the odd legend "WINE BASED DRINK".

It turns out this stuff has been knocking around for a while, as there seems to have been a brief hoo-hah about it back in 2015 in the wake of this Daily Mail article. It being the Mail you should obviously take any numbers or maths within the article with a big pinch of salt - for instance the article makes the following claim:

Industry guidelines state that any drink containing less than 75 per cent wine must be described as a 'wine based drink'

A moment's reflection should reveal that this must be wrong, or at least incomplete, as it doesn't specify a lower bound, and therefore implies that you could sell, for instance, Ribena as a "wine-based drink". It'd also be nice to think that to be described unequivocally as "wine" a bottle would have to be, you know, 100% wine. Anyway, this industry insiders' website makes a much more plausible claim, as follows:

The International Organisation of Vine and Wine states that to be called a ‘wine based drink’ the product must contain a minimum of 75% wine, though producers do not have to divulge what the remaining 25% is made up of.

That has the virtue of actually making sense, though the second part is a bit worrying. You'd like to think the producers are just cutting it with some grape must or something, rather than Cillit Bang or dog sweat, but you never know. My brief encounter with it leads me to recommend fairly strongly that you spend the extra 40p or so and buy something that's actually labelled "wine". Opinions elsewhere on the internet vary quite widely: this reviewer is blithely unconcerned about the subterfuge, while this ostensibly quite in-depth article doesn't even mention the "wine based drink" thing but does enthuse at some length about what a relatively small amount of arsenic there is in it:

From the testing we've done, Gallo does it right. They try to be competitive and try not to have excess arsenic in their wines. To me that's proof that it's not necessary to have excess arsenic in wine.

When you consider that the eventual product could, presumably, legally be up to 25% arsenic, you have to salute their commitment to customer service. Cheers!