Raw Spirit (43 page)

15: Tunnel Biking

GLENKINCHIE BY BIKE
. This is trusty-steed, knight-on-a-quest stuff (it’s hard not to feel a bit heroic when you’re on a bike. On the other hand Glenkinchie is the distillery nearest to our house, so I’m not being
that
heroic). I’m riding a Honda VFR 800; by general agreement, one of the best bikes on the road today. If that nice Mr Gore had been allowed to assume presidency after winning the election, at this point I’d almost certainly be extolling the virtues of what I still think is the the world’s best-looking motor cycle, the Harley-Davidson V-Rod, however after the Bush putsch I started my own trade embargo.

The Honda is red in colour, which is generally a good thing in a motorbike and certainly makes this one look pretty damn splendid. The old VFR 750 I owned before this model was nothing special in the looks department, plus mine was a sort of dull green, which did it no favours, however the new one looks great. It has two double exhausts exiting right up under the seat so it almost looks like a Ducati if you sort of squint at it in subdued lighting conditions.

Ducatis are fabulous-looking and fabulous-sounding machines, but they can be uncomfortable to ride, especially if you’re over six feet tall, and the consensus amongst bike magazine journalists seems to be that they’re still not as well screwed together as Hondas. The 800 also has brilliant-in-every-sense headlights, which is an area where a lot of otherwise very
good,
very fast bikes fall down (falling down being something that very good, very fast bikes are in general quite good at anyway).

I’m sort of a born-again biker, though my early biking days were limited in nature. I had the use of a Suzuki 185 GT for about six months back in 1976, looking after it while its owner was abroad, and that was pretty much that.

Then a few years ago I thought it would be fun, and a challenge, to learn to ride a bike properly, so did a course locally, sat and passed my test and, as tends to happen,
really
started to learn how to ride a bike afterwards (all the test can really do is make sure you’re not too big a menace to others or yourself before you’re allowed out unsupervised to start the actual learning). I’ll never be as entirely comfortable on a bike as I feel in a car – it’ll never feel as second nature just because I’ve been learning how to drive cars ever since I was seventeen, whereas I’ve only been learning about bike riding since my early forties. But oh-my-goodness it’s fun. Scary fun, sometimes, but fun.

I’d better emphasise that I can only ever describe the merest foothills of what it is to be a biker, leaving the higher slopes to others; I’ve never done a wheelie or got my knee down and don’t really anticipate ever doing either, at least not deliberately. (A wheelie is when, through the application of just the right degree of Too Much Throttle you get the front wheel of the bike to lift off the ground. Getting your knee down is when you lean over so far while taking a corner that the outside of your knee – or hopefully the slider pad that you’re wearing on top of your leathers – makes contact with the road surface.) A lot of bikers wouldn’t consider me a proper biker at all because I haven’t done both of these, or fallen off yet, and I wouldn’t quibble with them. As I’ve got older I’ve decided that life is largely about having fun without frightening yourself – or others – too much, and the level at which I’ve set my bike fun just precludes such doubtless adrenalising shenanigans.

This comes back to the whole thing about not liking being frightened, and fairground rides. The few times I’ve been on an
extreme
ride, I’ve spent the time worrying whether it’s all been put together properly, and thinking back to my days as a non-destructive testing technician, imagining hairline cracks propagating around bolt holes and slag inclusions in the welds linking up under stress, while wondering if all this G-force is really that good for the human body. On the other hand, it has to be said extreme rides are probably so ridiculously safer than Drunken Urban Climbing, or one plastered idiot throwing himself off a high wall into the arms of another – even just the once – that the difference is barely worth measuring.

I’m a solitary biker; I love the feeling of freedom the experience gives, even if you do have to surround yourself with a whole prophylactic suite of helmet, armoured leathers and Serious Boots. Of course, you don’t
have
to; only the helmet is compulsory in this country. But the thought of biking in a helmet, shorts, trainers and T-shirt (as you do sometimes see people doing), so that, if something you couldn’t avoid does happen, you end up sliding along the road at 50 miles an hour or whatever, scrubbing off speed by the gradual abrasion of your wrist, ankle, knee, pelvic and spinal bones – the flesh having sloughed easily, if painfully, off in the first half-second or so – while your helmet keeps your brain undamaged, entirely conscious and in full-on pain-appreciation mode is enough to make me look upon my insect-spattered leathers with something almost bordering on affection.

Part of the reward of riding a bike is that it makes you absolutely a better driver. The most obvious effect is that you become more sensitive to the road surface. Obviously when you’re in a car you have to watch out for things on the road like ice and just lots of rain and standing water (watching out, and then ignoring the signs and taking unexpected upside-down excursions off Highland roads, in my case), but when you’re on a bike you suddenly became hypersensitive to the presence of stuff like a little gravel on the road’s centre line, a curved smear of mud extending from the entrance to a field, the rainbow hint of colour that indicates a diesel spill, metal
manhole
covers slicked with rain or a patch of damp autumnal leaves lying in a shady corner.

The point is that a car just sits there. You don’t get out of a car and have it fall over. (I’m told this even applies to three-wheelers.) Cars are, essentially, stable. Get off a bike and forget to put its side-stand down and the bugger will fall over with a loud and probably surprisingly expensive clunk. The same applies when you’re underway. The gyroscopic effect of the wheels means that once you’re going at even extremely modest speeds you’re kind of dynamically balanced, but it’s still all about equilibrium, about poise.

Compared to driving a car, riding a bike feels like halfway to flying. There’s suddenly a third dimension involved. Cars basically stay flat. They’ll dive under braking, squat under acceleration and roll in a corner (being in a Citroën 2CV taking an average corner at, oh, twenty miles an hour is an extreme ride all by itself if you’re not prepared for it), but the movements are relatively mild. On a bike, with a little experience and confidence, you find yourself leaning all over the place; you, the bike, and the whole tipped world suddenly take on angles you’ll never see in a car unless you are, technically, crashing.

All of which is entirely fine, dandy and fun as long as there’s lots of nice sticky grip between your one powered wheel and the road surface, but which brings on instantaneous gut-freezing fear the nanosecond you feel that grip start to go and the wheel – and the rear of the bike, and with it
your
rear – start to slip. I’ve had a few moments on the three bikes I’ve owned, a couple of micro-skids which I’ve managed, probably more through good luck than inherent skill, to control, but it’s arguably those instants of fear, and the associated gut-level, bone-level appreciation of the dynamics of the balancing forces of grip, power and the relationship between the bike and the road that help make you a better, safer rider in future and to some extent a better road user in general.

Heading across the Forth Road Bridge, I take the main road into Edinburgh rather than the signposted route to the city bypass. This avoids the ludicrous A8000, a stretch of ordinary
two-way
road between the motorway and the bridge that should have been upgraded at least to dual-carriageway standard 40 years ago when the bridge was built. A bit of jiggery-pokery on some quiet wee roads and I end up on the bypass later anyway. You have more choices on a bike, because even if you do end up in a traffic jam, you can thread your way through towards the front by taking the narrow channel between two lanes of cars, or just overtake a single lane. Routes that you might avoid in a car because you know there’s going to be stationary traffic ahead you’ll happily tackle in a bike because the jam will only slow you down a bit.

It’s a hot old day, and so there are a few Random Indicator Events. These are when people leave their indicator lights flashing long after the manoeuvre they were warning people of has been completed, so that you find cars and vans sitting in any given lane with either set of indicators blinking merrily away. You see a lot more of this sort of thing in hot weather because that’s when people are more liable to have their windows open and so can’t hear the indicator clicking above the noise of the wind, engine and tyre roar. And of course hot weather is usually bright weather, so noticing the tell-tale on the dash is harder in the glare, too.

Approaching a vehicle sitting in the nearside lane which is indicating it’s about to pull out in front of you when there seems no need for it to do so is slightly worrying when you’re in a car –
is
this bozo going to suddenly put themself in my way, or is this just a seasonal Random Indicator Event? – but when you’re on a bike it’s much more anxiety-promoting. You’re not worrying about your bodywork, you’re worrying about your body. Then you have to decide whether to flash your lights at them, or honk the horn as you pass and use your own indicators to suggest they might like to check the state of their stalks.

A roundabout on a bypass. Big queues ahead. Who does the road planning around here? I head gingerly down the gap between the two lines of traffic. This will never feel entirely natural to me. In fact it feels a bit like cheating, but on the other hand when I’m in my car and a biker threads their way
down
the central channel, I don’t mind; it doesn’t lengthen the amount of time I’ll have to spend in the jam, after all, so why should I resent it? However I do feel vaguely embarrassed to be doing this. Just all those years of being a car driver, I suppose. The only thing more embarrassing than heading down the central channel is not doing it, queuing up behind the stationary traffic, and then having a fellow biker pass you and disappear towards the front of the jam while you sit there like a prune.

Through Dalkeith; the place specialises in traffic jams and today there are roadworks as well. Sitting in the bright sunlight in my black leathers, I start to get quite hot. Then finally it’s open-road stuff again, taking some wee daft roads to Glenkinchie. The route includes a ford, which is something you don’t see every day, certainly in Scotland. In fact I can only think of one other ford in Scotland on a public road, on a wee road near the Carron valley reservoir. This ford has a steep exit over badly pitted tarmac, and when the VFR splashes through the water I feel the back wheel slip momentarily as I get up a bit of speed to carry us over the cratered surface, but we get out without any further nonsense. I always seem to end up doing stuff like this on inappropriate bikes.

The first bike I had after I passed my test was a CB 500, which – I read in the bike mags – was an all-rounder. Somewhat idiotically, I took this to mean you could use it like a trail bike and kept taking it up farm tracks and down muddy paths, over rocks and through streams and stuff, and so fell off a lot, tumbling over the handlebars on at least one occasion, though at such low speeds all that ever got hurt were the bike’s extremities. Inappropriate bike, see? Should have done all that sort of stuff on a trailie.

On the other hand, the old 500 proved perfectly fine for going through disused railway tunnels. There’s an old railway line which passes by Glenfarg on the way to Perth; you used to be able to get up onto the route of the line from a minor road nearby, drive along the track bed – the rails were obviously lifted long ago – then drive into this tunnel. It was a good long tunnel, too, and curved, so that when you were in
the
middle you couldn’t see any daylight from either end. The bike’s headlight showed up very little because everything it pointed at was dark earth or soot stained bricks and rock. There was a bridge across the main road at the far end of the tunnel, and I could probably have followed the route of the old track to a way back onto the road, but I turned and went back the way I’d come because it had been such brilliant, eerie fun. The access point is fenced off now, so that’s that. Besides, I wouldn’t even try that sort of thing on the VFR; too much of a road bike.

And so to Glenkinchie, a neat little distillery in a sleepy but well-turned-out-looking wee village. Pencaitland is south and east of Edinburgh, set in gently rolling wooded countryside, one more nexus in a web of GWRs. The distillery has a daintily clipped-looking bowling green which you pass on your way to the Visitor Centre, and there’s a general air of civilised peace and quiet about the place. There’s a good exhibition in the Visitor Centre, including a huge and intricate model distillery which was housed in the Science Museum in London for a couple of decades. Two big stills dominate the business end and one of the warehouses is a four-storey affair, stepped back into the surrounding valley’s steep side so that the ground and top levels both have entrances at ground level.

Another well-promoted whisky, as the Lowland representative of the UDV/Diageo Classic Malts collection, Glenkinchie is full of heathery, flowery scents, with a long finish. In its own quiet way there’s quite a lot going on in here, and to be honest it’s beyond my uneducated palate to sort it all out, but there’s a definite impression of complexity. The obvious solution is to have more and work out what it is that’s going on, but that never quite seems to resolve things. Still fun trying though.

Last bike-related plus of the day is that there’s no toll charge for motorbikes on the Forth Road Bridge. You have to slow down to a trundle until the toll operator registers your passing, but that’s all. Look, it’s only 80 pence for a car – and even that’s northbound only, so effectively 40 pence each way – but
you’re
still getting something for free that car drivers have to pay for, so it just feels good, okay?