Merinder's House

Modern economies and tourist information have a preoccupation with romanticising the mundane. They promote it and provide it with virtues which do not exist. People and communities struggle to live up to the stereotype and visitors are disappointed when it does not match the expectations they have been given. Remote places are associated with a lack of progress and something called traditions, and cities and islands alike are expected to conform to something called a “brand”.

In keeping with one or two of the better travel writers, I have always sought out the absurd rather than the ordinary, and I have rarely been disappointed. In my youth, I had the pleasure of encountering a one-room log cabin on a remote mountain, built to house only a grand piano. I met someone who had lost their memory and was retracing their steps to try and find it. On train journeys and coastal boats I heard stories that lasted a whole day and a whole night, and in all these years, I have never forgotten them.

I have seen places where the sun never sets and ones where it does not rise, and sometimes too, I have spoken with people who do not move or who move too much. I have seen houses perched on the edge of extinction and islands made by the sea overnight. In some of the places, I have even stayed a while.

I do not believe I have ever yet visited a place where anyone lives up to the generic stereotype, for if they were to do so, they would be so much of an exception as to give a whole new meaning to the word. Usually, because I am, myself, on a journey, I meet only those who are curious, or undefined, because that is the nature of journeys. The stories they generate last for ever.

Jane Coutts, who recently wrote Merinder’s House, Scottish fiction with a European flavour.