Whisky galore
This weekend is one of my favourites of the year with the whisky festival on Saturday and Scribblers Picnic on Sunday.
Whisky drinkers are a little spoilt for choice this year, with two separate festivals on the same day - the Spirit of Stirling Whisky Festival at the Albert Halls and the Stirling Whisky Festival at the Highland Hotel.
Many of us regulars doubted that both festivals would make it this far – having two on the same day will certainly split the crowds, but whether it splits the profits enough that both are in jeopardy for next year remains to be seen.
Anne doesn’t completely believe me when I say this (to be honest, neither do I), but getting merry is not the primary reason for attending a whisky festival. A bottle from one of Scotland’s hundreds of distilleries will cost £40-plus. For most of us, that’s a little much to gamble on something you may not like, so visiting a whisky festival gives you a chance to expand your palate for the cost of a ticket costing less than £30.
A couple of years ago I got to sample“The Shackleton”, a painstakingly reconstructed copy of a long lost blended malt found buried in the ice at the Antarctic explorer’s camp just a few years ago. At £100 a bottle, I’m unlikely to buy a bottle, but as this column proves, having tasted it I now have an interesting whisky story to tell. If you are off to either the Albert Halls or the Highland Hotel on Saturday, I hope you have fun. Naked Gardening Day on Saturday (www.wngd.org). I explained that a survey by organisers it turns out that gardening comes second only to swimming in a list of activities people would be happy to consider doing naked.
I said that, obviously, hedge and grass strimmers would have to be banned for health and safety reasons, as would shears and secateurs. Nettle patches would have to be more rigorously avoided than normal and the beekeepers would probably have to be exempt from any organised activities.
At that point, I couldn’t keep a straight face any longer, so withdrew my proposal and replaced it with one to alert people to the 2017 event – just in case any of them want to head to the gym and tone up ahead of it.