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scotchodysseyblog

You catch me at a calculated crisis in my training. Over recent days I have not been sculpting my body, efficiently recovering and appropriately refuelling. Exercise has taken the form of tramping around the Newcastle conurbation firstly on middling quantities of alcohol and secondly on negative quantities of sleep. Refuelling amounts to lager,

This jacket is so hi-vis it, ironically, blinds you.

a  homemade curry, fast-food fries and sandwiches carefully selected for their non-aggravating fillings. And I have plans to repeat all of this tonight.

In short, it is the perfect time to ignore the question ‘What Would Lance Armstrong Do?’ I knew I couldn’t put off any more a visit to two of my friends at university in the Newcastle area. I also knew that the birthday of one of my very best friends was more than likely to fall on the same date it always has. For someone pursuing the fitness level required to cycle in excess of 1300 miles in a very bumpy country, it perhaps wasn’t ideal to fit both into three days. But I’ll only know for sure if it really was too stupid with the benefit of hindsight so Newcastle, here I come! Er… again.

I’ll give some treatment to tonight in next week’s post but in the calm between the two storms I can now reflect on the aftermath of the last one.

Armed with sleeping bag and toothbrush and together with Ross, I took the bus to Gosforth. On the way down anticipation and acute anxiety made a toxic cocktail in my innards. The last time I spent the night near the Tyne for very little of it was I horizontal. Instead I was slouched like a discarded doll on the floor of a Gateshead bathroom I still see sometimes in my nightmares.

Such memories of being flamboyantly unwell returned to me after we met up with Stevie C, arrived at his student digs and were in the process of cooking a chicken korma. This, with rice and naans, went down very well, although I think the salmonella incubation period is very soon to expire…

It was a good night, though, having infiltrated both the Newcastle and Northumbria student unions. In the latter I was asked by Adam, a Northern Irish guy I’d heard a lot about and whom I can now attest to be a magnificent bloke, what whisky he should try. Anxious for him not to have a bad experience, I pointed to the trusty Glenfiddich 12-year-old. He liked it. And tried the Glenmorangie Original sat next to it behind the bar to make the comparison. A convert!

At our next port of call, I quickly saw that I’d be making no such recommendations to an interested party. The Gate, a collection of clubs, restaurants and cinemas, is the exact antithesis of anything I could claim to be comfortable with. Affecting a more exaggerated drunken stagger to fit in with the ”mortal” hordes, I was deeply relieved when we found the quieter clubs to be closing and the bigger, stickier ones full to bursting. The half-hour walk back to Gosforth in the freezing cold sobered us up nicely.

Sadly, this didn’t make for a fuller night’s sleep. There exists in me a dichotomy which I cannot explain and which upsets me a lot. I’m devoting nearly six weeks and far too much money to touring Scotland and hunting out its whiskies but drinking alcohol with the masses and far from home makes me less relaxed than I would be on the rougher streets of  Basra. Petrified of getting queasy in front of people and fully aware of how little my system likes alcohol at the wrong times (it won’t tell me when these are); unenamoured by sensations of drunkeness but surrounded by expectation, a depressingly high percentage of nights out are endured rather than enjoyed. I must be the only teenage whisky fanatic who hates getting drunk and expects to throw up long before he is.

But to discuss the tour itself. Ringing round all of my hotels and B&Bs proved to be a shrewd exercise. A couple of dates had to be adjusted and my call reminded one place that they really should transfer my details, made a note of in the back of  last year’s diary, into the pages of this one’s.  I have also bought two of the items of apparel I estimate shall be most in demand come April and May: the jacket (see above) and waterproof over-trousers. Now I’m just waiting on a couple of base layers and another pair of shorts and, clothing-wise, I’ll be able to tough-out anything my travels have to throw at me. Outside cycling should be possible before long. Although having said that, whilst writing this the wind has switched to now come very determinedly from the North and snow flurries have made intermittent re-appearances. Great…

Turbo training: carrying on from where the Indian subcontinent, GCSE Physics lessons and the iron maiden left off.

Until I’m actually ploughing along Scottish roads (and very probably leaving a furrow such shall be the load over my rear wheel) I have decided to post a weekly update on where I am physically, logistically and mentally. This week is the exception, obviously, but venting my spleen about technology was a matter of some urgency.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my fitness regimen has begun. Just like the rest of the UK, Northumberland received its quota of snow, ice and cold. The only exercise I got throughout the cold snap was dragging my sledge back up the hill again. After what seemed like months, though, it cleared. However, ice on the pavements was slow to thaw and so recognising that a broken leg really wasn’t what I needed, it was last week before I donned my trainers and ran.

I returned from my first circuit an interesting colour. This was partly because of the cold, but mostly because you would have to go back to before Christmas, before my dental operation left me with a face like a butternut squash, for when I last did anything vaguely cardio-vascular. My next run was better, however, which reassured me that my level of fitness pre-op would be quite easy to re-acquire.

But I needed to get on with some cycling, too, so yesterday I set up the turbo trainer for a more specific appraisal of my legs. For those of you who have never done it, it is one of the most boring and damp things you can do. To combat the former I’d rigged up the CD player so I could work out to Rush’s ‘Snakes and Arrows Live’ and to tackle the latter I was in the garage. With the door open. This was much colder than my past sessions in the conservatory had been but this didn’t stop the perspiration pooling in the most alien of places, which the air then turned to ice. I got off as the last chord of ‘The Main Monkey Business’ melded into the first couple of ‘The Larger Bowl’, my legs a bit more wobbly than I had expected. I dismantled everything, ate my recovery meal and longed for a little more warmth so that I might get on the road for real. One of cycling’s quirks is that you can ramp up distances pretty quickly and if I could do 25 miles before lunch in an hour and a half 3 years ago, I reasoned, it should only be a case of altering my approach slightly: allowing myself an extra hour, maybe, before I could then go out again after lunch and very quickly 60 miles in a day doesn’t sound so impossible. This isn’t racing, I shall have to tell myself often, this is touring.

I don’t just need my quads and calves at peak fitness for April, though. My nose and palate must be at the top of their game, too. Their training began last week after a long sensory lay-off. In mid-December I had a wisdom tooth taken out which involved putting me under general anaesthetic. It also involved the surgeons shoving breathing tubes up my nose. What I was told when I came round and blood simply refused to stay in my face was that I had very narrow nasal canals, to the point where they couldn’t fit anything down my left one. Having said that, they must have given it a damn good go: for four days afterwards I couldn’t put a tissue to my nose without discovering reddy orange spots on it when I took it away again. So the back of my nose was a mess, as was the back of my mouth. I had a few drams over Christmas but significantly diluted after a neat dose of Longmorn 15-year-old (45% abv) brought on the sensation that my jaw was melting.

Last Saturday I poured a measure of The Balvenie DoubleWood into my snifter glass, anxious about a noticeable dip in performance. All I found was that the back of my nose numbed slightly after a while when analysing the neat spirit but otherwise I noted down the familiar honey, wood, rich malt and delicate peat notes of this wonderful whisky. I had lost my firm grip on the sensory memories of other malts, however, which I find make tasting a breeze when I’m well-practised. I should be heading back in the right direction after another couple of tastings, though.

Touching on my itinerary, I have collated onto a single piece of paper all of the information concerning my trip in calendar format: the date; the start and end points of the day; the distillery(ies) I’m visiting; where I’m staying, and any public transport I need to use. My next task is to ring around and confirm with my proprietors that I’m staying with them when I think I am.

It could be argued that the greatest achievement of the past week was not the brace of two-mile runs I’ve completed, the forty-minute turbo trainer session I endured or my first tasting since my wisdom tooth extraction, but replacing the image at the head of my blog.

Back in time I vowed to myself that computers would never provoke me to red-faced, stammering apoplexy, but creating this blog has witnessed me attaining this state of rage on an every-other-day frequency. I am not computer literate, but I am a perfectionist and I like to achieve things independently. The two days I wasted trying to install the software succeeded only in raising my core temperature and temporarily collapsing certain mental pathways. So I got the nice people who provide my hosting to do it for me. Whilst I loathed not having done it myself, and still more not knowing where I had gone wrong, all of which meant I didn’t feel the blog was truly mine because I didn’t have a mastery over its basic mechanics, I did have my space on the web. I’ve added pages, personalised my Blogroll and generally come to see the bigger picture. But that picture was a pencil. And even I was struggling to invent an explanation as to how it was in any way relevant to my blog.

I asked a very computer literate friend of mine how I might replace it with an image of my own and regrettably her instructions contained the same type of acronyms and allusions to mysterious file locations that had so defeated me in the intial set-up. However, I dabbled. Despite not knowing any CSS (cascading style script, darlings), I managed to isolate, having found where all of the images my theme uses are saved, the piece of code controlling the questionably significant pencil. I was told I needed to swap the URL of this image with that of my own. After re-sizes, re-savings, re-uploadings and reactionary violence, I entered the correct address into the style script, clicked ‘Update File’, did a hard refresh and there was my image. Much yelling and jumping up and down followed until I had to stop, so acute was the oxygen debt.

I dropped by at a friend’s house that afternoon and proudly entered my web address into the browser of her computer. There was my blog. There wasn’t my picture. This upset me. Greek style.

In the following days I had two conversations with those nice people whose hosting services I’ve purchased but still that image remained invisible to all but us. Last night I had a chat with a local web designer who suggested I experiment with another image from somewhere completely different. I duly logged on again but thought I’d try one more URL for the image I wanted. And that is why you can now see a bike frame with a Tormore and a Glencadam in its bottle cages. Of course, it isn’t that big a deal, but because it would not work and against all computer logic which, and this has been the only benefit I have gained from being repeatedly defied, has wormed its way into my understanding, it became one. But thanks to a few alterations which I made, it was all sorted out in the end. I’ll take that consolation goal.

Hello! Many thanks for reading what must surely be some of the least professional-looking pages on the World Wide Web. I’m working on it, though: “WordPress for Dummies” should be thrust through my letterbox very soon and I’m expecting a hefty dosage of the fortitude I require to grapple with all things technical.

My main concern, however, is providing engaging and unique content and this should come quite naturally. One would expect nothing less from a seven-week cycle tour of Scotland and her malt whisky distilleries, surely? I certainly have high hopes (see ‘The Mission’ page in the right side bar) for my journey in malt whisky. Some of the roads and washbacks will be familiar,  for example those concerned with The Glenlivet, Auchentoshan, Glenkinchie, Edradour and Aberfeldy distilleries, but when I visited this quintet I had the use of a car and a nice holiday cottage, or my own home, to return to afterwards. This is different. My mode of transport is a touring bicycle, my accommodation is whatever I managed to find within a hopelessly tight budget and I’m prohibited from coming back until I have taken every distillery tour in Scotland.

I embark on my whisky odyssey in April and so that is when this blog shall assume its true character and function, but as the date of departure approaches I hope to tell you about my training, both physical and mental, in readiness for forty-one days alone in one of the planet’s most beautiful countries and stages that feature a glut of either drams, miles, or a combination of the two. I’d also like to relate some of the challenges organising such a feat has presented and provide advice for anyone obsessed enough with Scotch to contemplate undertaking something similar, for there are many to keep in mind!

The premise first occurred to me early last year and initially considerations, chiefly of time and cost, almost consigned it to the “Don’t be so stupid” box. However, I committed myself to a gap year (between high school and university) anyway and the fallow months between A levels and A level results seemed to suggest, as I somewhat idly began researching the components of a tour like I had envisaged (at that stage I had made enquiries for a different use of the time: seasonal work as a guide in one of Islay’s distilleries),  that amassing all the required arrangements and information wasn’t that Herculean a task.  In fact, what began as a directionless consumption of spare time in retaliation against exams-related anxiety convinced me that I could actually do this. Three months on MultiMap.com and the VisitScotland website later I had accommodation circled virtually in red and thirty-nine journeys plotted out between my distilleries. I was doing this.

As I write, I have the bike, the accommodation is booked and partially paid-for, my public transport links to get me over sea and between towns have been thoroughly investigated and I have this blog. In three months I set off. I hope you will choose to join me in my final preparations and follow my back wheel on this blog which will describe my experiences on all forty-nine of Scotland’s malt distillery tours (and a lot about the 1330 miles of cycling in between them) squeezed into forty-one days.