Slug House

Two thirds of the way from one Christmas to another. An auspicious day on which to begin...

I pass this abandoned, unfinished 'house' - it was destined to be somebody's dream house, without a doubt - every time I reach the top of the Slug, the pass over the hills between Deeside and the town of Stonehaven that featured near the start of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's classic A Scots Quair (the 'Slug Road' is known nowadays, more prosaically, as the A957).

This evening, with the start of this journal very much in mind, I stopped the car beside the road and walked over to the site, camera in hand.

The sculptural form of planks, sheet and piping in the would-be basement took me completely by surprise. Had someone consciously arranged things this way? As they left? In despair at the loss of their dreams over a far horizon, the prospect of failure?

The house always reminds me too of the multitude of unfinished 'dream homes' I saw scattered quite wantonly within the villages and across the countryside of Galicia on a 'road trip' to Compostela and Cape Finisterre some years ago. Also, the plague of 'villas' infesting the Sicilian coastline that feature in so many of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano crime novels.