In summer 2021, my family celebrated the relaxing of the covid restrictions with a more-than-one-household holiday in a big massive beautiful old house in the middle of nowhere remote Scottish highlands. So remote even my friends from the highlands have never heard of this place. So remote we had to run through grassy fields, like a schemey version of the Von Trapps, chasing after a supermarket delivery van because the driver refused to believe the place existed. (After which we took receipt of our shopping through a large bush on the side of the road as if we were covertly picking up industrial quantities of heroin and not, like, toilet paper and bagels and ice lollies.)
We arrived and it looked as idyllic as air bnb advertised.
The doorway had roses on it.
The surroundings looked like this.
But not every detail was quite so idyllic.
Firstly, there were just, like, creatures everywhere. The second you set foot outside the front door, you would immediately be chased by this cunt and multiple hangers on.
And god forbid you happened to leave the front door open and unattended for a moment. Deer in the foyer. This happened thrice. There are no pictures of the foyer deer because we were all too busy running about going, ‘there’s a deer in the hall!!! there’s a deer in the hall!!!’ which, btw, is not how you get a deer out of the hall.
One night there was a bat. It, of course, flew up to the highest point in the house, which was three storeys up. Luckily, my uncle’s brother is a batman (lowercase B, unforch). Cue us all sequestered in one room while my uncle stands three floors below the bat, screaming down the phone, ‘a cannae fuckin coax him oot, Dermott, he’s licking the fuckin skylight!’
Apparently the way to get rid of a bat is to just open all the windows and doors and cross your fingers that it fucks off of its own accord. You will recall what happened whenever the front door was left open… that was deer encounter number 3.
Additional shoutout to the bits of dead moths, butterflies and other winged beasties liberally sprinkled throughout all drawers, cupboards and shelves.
The wildlife theme carried over into 50% of the house’s decor. Stag heads on walls, taxidermy everything on all the surfaces. We did take a wee shine to this badger, purely because he was neither particularly disturbing nor particularly disgusting.
It would almost be cute if it wasn’t formerly alive.
The other 50% of the decor was holy themed. You really can’t capture the scale of it in a photo (we tried) but every wall in the house was covered with pictures of saints. Our favourite was this one who is probably a saint with whom we are unfamiliar, but who just looks like a kind of yassified female Jesus.
There was this one loooooong corridor taking you from one part of the house to the other. However long you are imagining this corridor to be, double it. It was long af. At the end of the corridor, there was a kitchen. In the kitchen, there was a bath.
Also in that kitchen was where we stored all the alcohol and soft drinks. So every time anyone was getting a drink, they had to make the long trip down the long corridor. No matter how recently you had last been down this corridor, something about it (I’m putting it down to the sheer duration of travel time) made you forget what awaited you at the other side. You could tell when someone had reached the end of the corridor when you heard their shriek reverberate throughout the house, indicating that they had once again been startled by what always felt like the sudden appearance of this life-sized bust of St Francis of Assisi.
A traditional part of any of our family holidays is a very competitive game of hide and seek. My bedroom had this absolutely perfect hiding place. So in I went.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with the festive masterpiece Christmas with the Kranks, but there’s a scene where the characters are hiding in the dark and they turn round and are frightened by Frosty the Snowman looming over them.
Now imagine exactly that, but with a statue of Our Lady.
All week we thought we could hear another creature somewhere in the inner workings of the house, inside a wall, maybe in a pipe or something. On our last day we discovered the source of the noise: the ‘creature’ invisibly scurrying around the house was in fact a Spanish man who lived in the walls. We suspect he was the house’s owner but we never found out for sure (we know the owner was Spanish, but he told us he was in Spain and that we would be alone). We passed this locked door all the time, never thinking much of it, but it turned out that this was the entrance to the secret man’s, idk, quarters.
I say the entrance to his ‘quarters’. I need to emphasise there was no extension, no extra wing, no other bit of house. He was quite literally through that door, and into the wall.
I believe the house was taken off air bnb for at least a while after we left because of the state of disrepair it had fallen into (the ceilings leaked, the windows leaked, the back door didn’t close and the oven didn’t work) having not been used over the pandemic. Apart from by the wall-dweller obviously who may or may not have been there throughout the entire lockdown or indeed his entire life.
Last year, when the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience hit headlines, my favourite part of the whole fiasco was the reveal of the character of ‘The Unknown—an evil chocolate maker who lives in the walls.’ A delightful reminder of a lovely family holiday.
I was prompted to write this now having recently seen the Disney animated film Encanto, which really spoke to me. I am led to believe that most people find it relatable due to its themes of self discovery or generational trauma or navigating difficult family dynamics. I’m not sure anyone at any stage of Disney’s story development process could have anticipated that someone would find the most relatable element to be the bit where the girl discovers a man living in the walls of her big weird house.
Also, one day we visited the nearest wee village and I am not even slightly exaggerating when I tell you that no less than 70% of the population of that village were wearing crocs.
The Spanish man in the walls was scary enough but the Crocs took it to the next level. I once stayed in an Airbnb in Sydney where there was an actual secret, windowless “quarters” and people were in there. I suspect they were watching everything we did on some supervillain-style surveillance system.
I feel the reason they put Francis in there is as a spiritual bouncer / guard, bc the bathroom-drinky-kitchen is auditioning for ‘The Shining’.