I know, your first thought is, “How the hell are you going to tie THAT together?”
Wander with me for a few minutes here.
The Ghost was a taste of that 23-year-old whisky that we moved today. As is the custom, when you’re moving full barrels, it’s best to put the valuable whisky in something other than an ancient oak barrel because you’ll run the risk of losing some whisky. So we pumped it into a big, non-reactive receiver for transportation to the top rack. There was a lot of nerve-wracking precision moving about a couple of hundred gallons of whisky now old enough to drink itself.
But Matt’s skill on the forklift was quite impressive. He moved the two 500-liter sherry cask butts to the top rack, and it was time to pump the whisky back into the casks for another couple of years till they reached their quarter century mark.
Of course, there will be a little bit in the hose…
And I just happened to be hanging around with my best hungry cat eyes. So I found myself with an inch or so in a glass.
I’m obviously getting pretty spoiled already.
I called this taste “The Ghost.”
I savored a half dozen little sips, and with whisky like this, you don’t really swallow or gulp. You take in a sip, and it just melds into your being.
The Ghost.
Of course, it’s natural to have something this rare and wax poetic, but I won’t bore you with all the “vanilla and apricot and ether and Cocoa Puffs” stuff.
Suffice to say, it was sublime.
And when it comes to describing these rare vintages, I really do like finding a song that describes the feeling rather than comparing it to other foods.
That’s like saying everything tastes like chicken.
It doesn’t.
And I don’t know what song aligns with this whisky yet, but I’ll get there.
The Grand.
Peter had secured a couple of tickets to the Summer Festival at Paxton House for a piano recital, so I changed into my only halfway decent clothes.
Remember, I packed three months of clothing into a carry-on, so one decent pair of pants and one decent shirt.
They were decent enough.
Paxton House is a grand Georgian mansion that came to be in the 1700s and is now open to the public. The recital was in a rather grand room with a hundred oil paintings of the countryside as well as heroic paintings of the generations that lived here over the centuries.
I know squat about classical piano or the brilliant people who play at this level, but I assumed the best when a flowery introduction brought Yevgeny Sudbin sauntering briskly through a side door to a room full of applause and seated himself smartly at the piano and began to play. I had no idea what he was playing till after the recital and could look at the program but kept track of which pieces were the most flavorful.
I tend to want to absorb as much as possible in a life performance like this. But first, let’s talk about the last thing next.
Michelangelo’s God.
You’ve seen the Sistine Chapel.
A lot of muscular, naked men flitting about, but the most famous is the muscular naked man limply holding out one hand, and God, all bearded and in a cloud, reaches out to touch him.
That God.
He came in hobbling and square, led by what I’d assume were his daughter, her daughter, and the boyfriend. We got up to make room for this man, and I realized he was Michaelangelo’s model. Same wild, grey beard. Same fierce eyes. He was more of a moving barricade. A farmer’s coat, rough boots, and a stick. Not a cane, a stick. Of course, it looked like a cane, but one got the impression that if you irritated him, it would become a stick.
He, at one point in his life, scared off a gang of bandits by throwing a huge, deer antler-handled knife at the lead bandit and stuck a piece of ear on a tree.
He spoke loud enough to make his daughter nervous, and he spoke in a thick Scottish brogue that I couldn’t understand, but if I could have had one wish right then, it would have been to take him to his favorite pub and get rousingly drunk and hear his stories.
The four of them sat in front of us on typical piano recital chairs and the two women kept casting nervous glances every time he moved during the performance, expecting him to say “Well that was nice but enough of these bollocks, let’s go get a pint,” loudly enough for people outside to hear him.
Imagine Robin Williams in a farmer’s coat with half a thumb missing and a God beard and wild white hair, having fun destroying a solemn piano concerto in a formal Scottish Great House.
I imagined it. Wonderful.
He was fabulous. And clearly far too old to give a shit what anyone thought. We all want to be him eventually.
But back to the music.
This Yevgeny guy was apparently quite the accomplished musician, and his performance of Liszt’s Funerailles was utterly beyond words.
Rather like that 23-year-old whisky.
Listening to powerful music performed live by a master musician is an unparalleled experience. No electronic barriers between you and the strings. It will only happen once, and even if it’s recorded, it will still only happen once, and you were there.
I wrote much of this in my head while listening to Yevgeny’s piano evoke war, battles, forests full of crickets, rain on a pond, a rabbit hiding in the heather, charging elephants, and dancing elves.
I listened with my eyes closed, then thought it might look like I was asleep and I wasn’t taking in the glory-dripping hall, and opened them again, but had to close them to concentrate on every note and the spaces between them.
When it was over, I just didn’t have the guts to ask God if I could buy him pints and hear of his battles and how he lost half a thumb. I played out all sorts of scenarios where his daughter envisioned Da tearing up the pub. Again.
So I had to be content to head back out to the narrow, hedge-row lined roads through lush farmland, ancient cottages just a few feet from the road, and a couple of pints of Guinness in a village hotel pub.
And I lamented that I just didn’t have the power of language to properly convey the flavors and sounds and visuals I encountered on a Friday in Duns, Scotland, but I shall continue to try, and maybe someday I’ll look back and say to myself… Nailed it.
