The Auchterarder Incident

Posh country house hotel, serioo about its food. Quiet early evening drawing room with the soft hubub of reserved British voices, but a sunny end to the day and a convivial, if private, scene.

Enter Hank and Wilma. Oh shit. Yanks.

'Would you like a drink?' asks the waitress.

'Sure. Can I have some of your local wiiiine?' says Wilma.

Oh my God. Auchterarer is about 10 minutes away from Gleneagles. This is Scotland. We are about ten squillion miles away from anywhere that produces wine.

'We don't really have any local wines, madam," says the waitress, who must be trying desperately hard not to soil herself.

'I thought I saw veenyards on the way here. Say, Hank, wasn't those veenyards we saw?'

'Looked like 'em honey.'

The kind of American accent that Monty Python do. You don't believe anyone actually does talk like that.

'I can assure you madam,' says the waitress who was holding in a potential rupture by now, 'That there are no Scottish wines. People might make hedgerow wines at home from brambles but there's no commercial production. Can I offer you perhaps one of our whiskies?'

They've got about 40 of them on the sideboard. They're sort of serioo about their whisky, too.

'Say! What a GREAT idea!' says Wilma. Did I mention that all of the American side of this dialogue is taking place at a shout? No? Well it is. We have all stopped talking and I notice one older couple has stopped talking: both of them are physically recoiling at every blast of ninety decibel banality.

'Sure!' says Hank. 'We'll have a Scotch whisky!'

'Which one would you like, sir?' asks the waitress.

'We'll have that one!' shouts Hank in triumph, pointing to a single bottle out of the 40 or so Scottish single malts. 'The Bushmills.'

Sarah, Irish, is in the advanced stages of asphyxia by now. But she completely loses it when the waitress has poured the drinks and, in a voice used to call in steers from the other side of Texas, Hank screams 'Slanty Var!' at her.

She's puzzled for a while, then works it out.

He means slainte bheatha.

They have the video camera out now and are filming each other drinking their Irish whiskies in their check jackets, all peace in the drawing room forever shattered. We leave and I have to half carry Sarah because she's in silent hegs and can't breathe properly.

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