Me in the Sunday Post on embarrassing dads…

That I should live to see Lesley Riddoch with a column in the home Oor Wullie. This is my ‘In My View’ piece about Mick Jagger and embarrassing dads…

Sir Michael Jagger – once known as Mick, lead singer with The Rolling Stones, is an ageing, if still thin rock star, originally from the sixties, now heading for his seventies. He is uncool. Seriously, deeply uncool. An utter and complete embarrassment. And we’re not just talking about terrible solo records like She’s The Boss here. No, he has been officially nominated an embarrassing dad. In Australian parlance,  he’s a ‘daggy’ daddy. So says his 18-year old daughter Georgia May.
Georgia’s mum is former supermodel Jerry Hall, who’s even less cool than Sir Mick, apparently, as she’s now “only interested in chicken farming.”  But it is the legendary Stones frontman’s dancing that really upsets his daughter.
“It’s pretty funny when dad gets on the dance floor” she says, “ because he has got such a, like, I don’t know how to describe his moves. But let’s just say he doesn’t go unnoticed, you know what I mean?”
The idea of Mick Jagger on any dancefloor  being in even marginally anonymous – imagine him at the Buckie British Legion on a Saturday slosh – is ludicrous. You’d notice those hips, those lips, anywhere. But most would be thrilled at the sight of even an aged Mick strutting his stuff. Not his offspring, though.
And there’s a tremendous relief in this, for dads everywhere. No father is ever cool to his own family. He may be valued, for his command of transportation logistics, his ready supply of £20 notes, his willingness to have his Mumford and Sons and XX albums ruthlessly appropriated.  But he cannot ever be cool. He is and always will be a social liability.
For example, this week my 16-year-old daughter Martha was off with her friends for the musical event of the year in our remote little community: a concert by dreadlocked one-man-boy-band, consummate guitarist and Peter Gabriel soundalike Newton Faulkner. Doing the job I do, I was keen to go too. After all, we play his records regularly on the radio show and in fact, it was my professional duty to go and nod along groovily to the lad’s tunes. Wasn’t it?
No. This would be embarrassing for Martha, who wanted to, ahem hang with her homegirls and homeboys in the ultra-fashionable surroundings of an echoing northern sports centre which smelt of liniment and sweaty trainers. I would have to steer clear of the Chinese restaurant, too, as she and her cronies would be dining there. Fair enough. Did she want a lift home? Yes please. A text would summon me.
Everything I do seems to embarrass Martha. Everything I wear. Especially the rather nice Paul Smith denim jacket I bought from eBay.
“You can’t go out wearing that! It’s got FADED SHOULDERS!” Fair enough. It does have a slightly…stonewashed vibe going on. “And those are PULL-UPS! You look like a really old CHAV! Why are your trainers red? Put on a pair of sensible shoes and a proper shirt.”
Hmm. I kind of take the point about the trainers. They are red. But they’re serious running shoes, and I just wear them around the house with track suit bottoms because they’re comfy. I mean, clearly I’m not going to go running in them. That would be ridiculous. I am, these days, built for comfort, not for speed. This offends Martha. And when I try to be fashionable, I get it wrong. This offends her too.
Poor Sir Mick has always had a slightly dodgy fashion sense. His leather jackets are too fussy, His trousers have too many buttons between them. That infamous wiggle of the hips, especially if  they aren’t his own original hips, is just a bit out of time, baby. There’s no aesthetic satisfaction there for the critical offspring.
But every dad is uncool to his son or daughter. It’s part of the deal. And the more you attempt to show how ‘down’ you are with modern music, clothes, movies or haircuts, the dafter you look, dude. It’s the rule. As for the dancefloor: Don’t look at me. It’s all over now. Wild Horses wouldn’t drag me out there…

 

 

Drinking for Scotland, legal drug dealers and our country’s shame

I gave up drinking for 31 days, once. Made a radio programme out of it. And then I went back to my Friday night red wine, my couple of whiskies a week, my beer and skittles. Without the skittles..

The occasional binge, too, in the sense of combining beer, wine and whisky in doses calculated to leave me slumped in an armchair, dribbling and snoring while Jools Holland once again elbows his mediocre piano into some hapless, desperate performer’s arrangement. Later. And later, and later, and later…

But in Caledonian terms, my binges do disservice to the word. I am, to put it mildly, a lightweight these days when it comes to booze. I hate, always hated being drunk, and now, when I find myself in social gatherings where alcohol is being taken, I usually safeguard my exit route before even beginning to imbibe. I ensure there’s a way home, or out, and when the boredom begins to seep through, when dehydration starts to sandpaper the thrapple, I make my excuses and leave. Or switch to Ribena.

I hang out with connoisseurs, sometimes. People who drink professionally, or who, to be more precise, describe whiskies for a living. Indeed, I have done this myself, though I always have to fight back the giggles, as there’s something essentially ridiculous about the striving to differentiate single malts, one from Glen t’other. Yes, they are different, but in the way grades of heroin and cocaine are different. The taste is not the point of whisky. It’s meant to do a job on you, enliven, inebriate, dull, destroy. Like Keith Richards’ obsessive hailing of Merck pharmaceutical ‘fluffy’ cocaine in his recent autobiography. Push comes to sniff, dirty lumps of Bolivian or Columbian crack or factory-made Swiss snow are drugs that deliver the same message to heart, brain and body. Whisky is a delivery vehicle for alcohol.

They are, for the most part, lovely folk, the dope dealers of the whisky trade. They are more than respectable, occasionally hilarious, often charming. It’s an area of Scottish life absolutely awash with money, and the marketing of uisge beatha has always been cutting edge, from the days of Tommy Dewar onwards. Doubtless he would have been happy to be called a brand ambassador. Maybe not an evangelist.

Whisky is now so suffused with lore, mythology tall tales, anal-retentive male compulsions and downright bullshit that you’d think it was some kind of art. It’s not. It’s a drug, disguised for its many niche and mass markets in the form of a social badge, a collector’s trophy, a mind-blowing display of wealth (silver, gold, platinum and diamonds encrusting a bottle? You got it) a signifier of coolness, of belonging.

Expertise has become the latest marketing tool. Whisky clubs and societies have sprung up worldwide, whisky festivals (I admit it. I participate. I talk phenols and oakiness, caramel and esters, washbacks and mash tuns. I judge whisky competitions, for goodness’ sake) see wise heads, young and old, slurping and nodding over rarities in hotel function suites. Notes are taken, words are slurred, stairs fallen down. A great deal of fun is had. Money changes hands. Lots and lots of money. Mantras? Excess is good. Greed is good. throw the cork away. Moderation is for sissies.

Elsewhere, the same companies slosh alcopops and factory-made sweet spirits into underage bellies. industrial scale drinking is encouraged at the annual alcofest-with-music that is Pee in the Dark, or T in the Park. Scotland goes out on a Friday and gets rat-arsed, crashes cars, kills pedestrians, freezes to death in a park. Slashes, burns, abuses, fights, smashes, damages. Does the same again on Saturday. Maybe a a few Smirnoff Ices on a Sunday to ease the way back into work on a Monday. Or just miss Monday out, why not? Internationally, countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas are targeted. Drink this, it’ll make you…richer, more attractive, it’ll make you belong. One glass makes you bigger, one glass make you small…

Hey, let’s not forget the weans. Foetal alcohol syndrome, anyone? Och, how can you have sex anyway if you aren’t pished? Brain damage. Shrinkage. Fits. The meaningless rubbish that’s sold only to mess you up, like Carlsberg Special, originally brewed specifically for Winston Churchill’s visit to Denmark after the war, now the tipple of choice for oblivion merchants everywhere.

Tomorrow, the Scottish Parliament will vote on party political lines and eradicate the proposed bill that would set a minimum price for alcohol in Scotland. Spurious arguments will be advanced that raising the price of a unit of rotgut cider will cause terrible damage to the economy, and won’t stop folk boozing unwisely anyway. Education is all. have a wee dram. Smell the history, the geography, the culture.

I don’t believe that for a moment. I am afraid that the drug dealers have once again flexed their considerable muscle and quashed the first serious attempt to tackle the shame that is Scotland’s relationship with alcohol. Gutless, ignorant, hidebound politicians have cowered before them.

So. That’s that, then. Might as well go out and get pished, eh? Just remember this salient fact: Two single malts: that’s enough to destroy your ability to appreciate their quality. After that, you might as well switch to Old Gumripper or Glen Haemorrhage. Slainte!

BACK TO BLOGGER! The Beatcroft is going home

Sorry about this folks, but it just hasn’t worked out with WordPress. So The Beatcroft will continue at its old home:

http://beatcroft.blogspot.com

Clumsy, tortuous and non-intuitive, WordPress was, in the end, no good at all with Android.

I’ll leave everything up until today here, and that includes the full archive for The Beatcroft.

Amy and someone who should never have taken off his baseball cap

At Belladrum. I’m asking Amy MacDonald if it’s really true that the Tom Morton show is her dad’s favourite radio programme ( it is, apparently). My fab hairstyle took hours of work by teams of coiffeuses.

Big Boy the cockerel and his girls

He’s a laugh a minute, and will fight off any otter.

Hillswick Ness, geocaching maintenance

Laziness has stopped me responding to the plaintive communiques from Geocachers (it’s treasure hunting/orienteering with GPS satnav, folks; outdoorsy nerdy gadget freakdom. ) that the Another Fine Ness (sorry!) cache had disappeared again.  But today, having finally worked out how the Garmin Etrex functions, I headed out to the Ness of Hillswick to  replace it.

Very, very midgy morning, utterly still. That’s three days in a row – very odd for Shetland. Took the direct route right through the centre of the Ness – the coastal walk is one of the UK’s great cliff routes, but no time today – 40 minutes to The Stone Table. Oddly, though the midges swarmed, they didn’t bite. Either my ingestion of heavy duty multivitamins or my sweaty kangaroo skin hat…

Great walk, straight back in 35 minutes, a record.

Seven distilleries. Scotland, England, Ireland (North and South), Wales. Eight days.

Well, that’s just about it. Seven distilleries – Highland Park, Pulteney, Bladnoch, Bushmills, Midleton, Penderyn, St Georges – in Orkney, Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, covered in eight days. Aboard two Triumph motorcycles.  Around 3700 miles covered. Seven bottles to add to the 50 or so collected by David Hayman and Vladimir MacTavish, and set to be auctioned for David’s Spirit Air charity in November.

I’m home now in Shetland, and Rob is back in Norfolk. The Triumphs are back with the Great Paul Wallace in Hinckley (no recriminations at all about the broken indicator and scraped paintwork on my one). We had a fantastic time at the Belladrum Festival, though that 630-odd mile hammer from Dereham in Norfolk to Drumnadrochit took its toll. It was freezing on the A9 at midnight.

Thanks a million to John Beach at the Fiddler’s in Drumnadrochit for his forbearance, kindness and fantastic hospitality, and to everyone there for the great food and coffee. Thanks to all the distilleries, to Triumph, to Irish Distillers for the Fota Island Spa and Resort (sorry about the mini bar) and to Jim, Alice and Stephen at Fairpley. A special huzzah to the Coton Morris Men for the welcome at St George’s. And our wives and families for putting up with all this.

I hate to say this, but next year, maybe Harleys in Kentucky….

The Witness Cairn, Ireland north and south, and an unfortunate event

Just sitting down to write this, after a Murphy’s (my first in Cork since my first ever Murphy’s, in the Railway Hotel here in 1978) and I can feel my attention …slipping away. Motorcycling: you ride, eat, sleep. Get up and ride again…

…if you can actually get on the bike. That’s been a problem for me since we set out on the Triumphs (heavy, armoured clothing, lack of suppleness, peculiar on-bike luggage arrangement) and today it nearly brought the whole trip to a premature end. We were just saying cheerio to Gordon and Colin at the excellent Bushmills, after a truly superb visit and even better scones (also a 15, an Ulster delicacy: 15 marshmallows, 15 digestive biscuits, 15 glace cherries, one tin of condensed milk: crush, soak, mix and chill; it’s got the density of uranium). The bikes, parked on a steep camber, were being arranged for a picture; I tried to step off mine, lost my balance and brought the Street Triple crashing down on top of me. For some reason, I was completely uninjured. the Triumph lost its front indicator. I felt like a complete idiot.

It took me until past Belfast to recover my equilibrium. With some 300 miles to go to Cork, all high speed motorway riding, it was essential to calm down. A lasagne and chips at TK’s Diner helped.  and now we’re at the Fota Island Resort, courtesy of those nice people at irish Distillers, whose Midleton distillery we’ll visit tomorrow.

Last night I met up with Sandy, Elaine and Wee Dave for a memorably delicious meal at 55 North in Portrush, and stayed with them at their friends’ restored, thatched cottage, deep in the Antrium forests. We also had possibly the best ice cream in the world, Maud’s Poor Bear, triple cones (it’s honeycomb vanilla.) Grandfatherhood is a privilege.  And another on the way in September, this time from a Glasgow direction!

And working backwards, on Sunday we left Bladnoch and decided to go on a wee pilgrimage to the shrine of St Ninian, needing, as we do, all the help we can get on this trip. You seem to have to pay to get access to St Ninian’s tomb at the Whithorn Abbey, but not to walk from teh harbour at Isle of Whithorn to what must be one of the most overwhelmingly emotive religious sites in Scotland: The Witness Cairn.

Just across a field from St Ninian’s Chapel, where pilgrims landing from Ireland on their way to Whithorn Abbey stopped to regain their land-legs, this is an inter-church project which encourages people to remember their departed loved ones by writing their name on a  stone and depositing it at this place of pilgrimage. It is clearly meeting a very important need. Thousands of stones, many with heartbreaking messages, are piled up, and we passed a stream of visitors on their way to the site.

Remembrance and pilgrimage are crucial elements of human life, I think. We paused, and passed on. First to Northern ireland, and my delightful family encounter, followed by my travails with a motorcycle. Did St Ninian cause the bike to fall, or stop it hiiting my legs? I knew I should have bought a badge in Whithorn! Then our fast and hilarious encounter with the Irish Republic’s toll road system: The first toll said it didn’t take sterling, but did. The second only took euros and credit cards, no sterling. The third took no credit cards, but did take sterling. Great roads.

And now we’re here. Mine’s a Jamieson’s! Wales tomorrow.

Orkney to Bladnoch, another Hugh, and how getting lost is a good thing

Knackered in Bladnoch, after a superb haggis, neeps and tatties at the excellent Bladnoch Inn. An early night looms before heading to Stranraer tomorrow to catch the ferry for Belfast.

I just don’t have the energy to write our adventures up in detail: Hugh Kerr’s BMW suffering a mechanical breakdown between Wick and Scrabster, and subsequently Hugh abandoning the Scottish leg, much to his and our regret. The very odd West End Hotel in Kirkwall. The start of the Barnard Challenge proper, with the presentation by Highland Park brand amabassador Gerry Tosh of an extremely special bottle for future auction, and our departure (at 5.00am) from Kirkwall to catch the Stromness ferry south.

Yesterday was a hard day. While I headed to Inverness for my last live TM show of the trip, Rob went to Dalmore to collect both an auction bottle and samples for last night’s performance of the Malt and Barley Revue in Strathpefffer. Stephen from Fairpley picked us up from The Anderson in Fortrose and the gig, a house concert courtesy of the splendid Steve and Clancy Macdonald, went really well. Good crowd, old and new friends, and the three Dalmores we tasted, guided by Rob, were excellent. £240 raised as well. Bed at midnight, some 20 hours after getting up…

Today we were off the Black isle by 9.30am and heading for the Ralia Cafe on the A9 to meet regular TM Show listener Hugh Docherty on his Suzuki 1250 Bandit Grand Toursimo. Bad weather to Stirling, where we lunched al fresco in the rain. And then…

…Rob got lost. He took the M9 to Edinburgh before we could stop him (he was leading, it was a roundabout exit) , and Hugh and I headed for Glasgow on the M90. The rain came down in torrents, and Hugh decided to head for his sister’s in Kilmarnock. Rob texted to say he’d meet me at Bladnoch. I took the route through Ayr and Stranraer, he, satnav guided, went M74, Abington, Galloway Forest Route. And lo, Rob was there 45 minutes before me, which was just as well, as he was able to pick up the auction bottle form the distillery before it shut.

So there we are. Pictures include us at Scrabster, the excellent Anderson in Fortrose, Mr Hugh Docherty, and 5.00am in Stromness. Tomorrow, it’s Stranraer, and Ireland, and the great joy for me of seeing Sandy, Elaine andWee Dave.

Orkney, with one missing in action

Hugh Kerr, who joined us just yesterday in Fortrose on his BMW F650, ran into a bit of technical trouble between Wick and Scrabster. Turned out to be nothing worse than the engine kill switch fitted to the side stand, but alas, diagnosis came too late for Hugh to make the ferry to Stromness.

The two Triumphs are now safely parked in Kirkwall, some 800 miles from their home in Hinckley and maybe 950 from  Dereham. But tomorrow, the Barnard Challenge proper starts at Highland Park (though Hugh and Rob visited Pulteney today, while I was broadcasting from the BBC studio in Wick – thanks to Malcolm and all at Pulteney for their great donation to the BC auction).

We had a splendid night (truly fantastic crab soup) at The Anderson in Fortrose – great to meet up with D and W on the trusty Triumph Daytona – and will be back there on Friday, which will be a really hectic day, ending up at Strathpeffer for a performance (by me and Rob) of the Malt and Barley Revue, or as much as my numb fingers and befuddled mind can remember. Hugh is overnighting in Wick and then heading back to The Anderson tomorrow for some extra r&r, before Saturday’s 276 mile run to Bladnoch in Wigtownshire.

Meanwhile, great news from David Hayman’s trip around a huge swathe of distilleries last weekend. We now have over 40 rare (some very rare)bottles for Bonhams to auction in November, raising cahs for Spirit Aid. I’m just hoping that the 19-year-old used Bourbon cask Pulteney in my pack survives…