When sleepless in the small hours, I think of the most soothing workplace I know: the stillroom at Caol Ila distillery on the Scottish island of Islay. Day and night, there’s someone there. (Whistling, like as not.) They’re snug, warmed by six stills. These colossal copper seahorses gently digest boiling beer, then exhale whisky vapour from their nostrils; the air is malt-laden and nourishing. Beneath plate-glass windows, a tussle of eddies swirls past.
Across the Sound of Islay lies , the “un-get-at-able” island to which George Orwell retreated to write Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jura is home to 5,500 deer; they’re mostly awake in the small hours, too. A handful will be gazing at the lights across the water – for unbroken minutes at a time. As deer do. Very elemental, very comforting.
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