LATE again. Turning on to the Dalry Road, past the keeper’s cottage for a reservoir now evaporated.

I’ve noticed it before, but in my ignorance I’d always assumed that some work might be going on and one day it would return along with the anglers’ abandoned cars.

In the bucketing rain of a west coast winter, or in fact any season, the water used to seep through the wall, lapping the road, sometimes just skimming it deep enough to make the drive interesting.

It felt like the telcom van was going under water all those years ago, the spray enveloping us while I stood stirring a gearstick that stood as tall as me.

There was a shoogle.

“Aquaplane, my friend, don’t you start away uneasy.”

The huge steering wheel swung as he sang over the rattle of the Comma’s engine sharing the cab with us.

“You poor old sod, you see it’s only me.”

Jethro Tull was a go-to for lyric-warping, along with classics like “fly me to Dunoon” and something about getting off his plough.

“When? When will you be landing?”

Ms Smith brings me back into the car, tip-toeing along the road that now runs like a river.

Up and over the hill and the Clyde coast opens up before me. A hazy Arran, Ardrossan Harbour, and Chapelhill Mount. The mount once had one of those huge concrete water towers on top, the kind that still lie anchored around the outskirts of Glasgow like some sort of flying saucer park-and-ride, their drivers wandering for years in search of a bus that never came.

Egged on by pals, I’d once gone into the tower through the broken hatch at its foot, climbing the narrow rusted ladder into the dark, past the pipes, until there until I ran out of rungs and light, my sister panic echoing from the bottom.

It’s been gone 30 years, but there’s still a gap on the skyline for me. Looking out the kitchen window of my nephew’s house onto where it once stood, I wonder how high into that now empty space I once got.

It’s he and his partner’s first home together, and I’ve been drafted to give it the once over. Everything had been painted white for the sale, but behind every cupboard door is the familiar grain of the wood I saw in my grandparents’ home just along the road all those years ago.

Offered a move from older council housing down in Busbie Drive, they were allocated one of these houses new, a joiner who helped build them moving in next door with his family — I wondered if it was his handiwork I was looking at.

Allocations policy has changed somewhat in the last five decades though.

My sister stays in what used to be Busbie Drive, renting an ex-council house privately, while her son and his partner have bought theirs. The right to buy may have been scrapped in Scotland, but the damage it has done lives on even now.

The best stock was sold long ago and now stands in private hands, distributed not on need, but on the ability to access debt, and new stock is too few to mention.

Scrapping the right to buy was probably the single most progressive act the SNP has taken in over 18 years of government, not that it’s radical at all, of course. It just looks that way when the world has taken leave of its senses.

Even so, housing, across the whole Britain, stands at the centre of the economic and social car-crash governments have chosen to live with.

Every single economic boom and, more importantly, bust since 1981 has housing at its heart. As that year’s Budget set about destroying the already struggling manufacturing base of this country, capital found other, safer, bets.

As planned, transferring housing debt from public to private hands was a key plank in undermining community solidarity and the willingness to strike, but its ripple effects go well beyond those disasters.

Every party, every chancellor, every government, for as long as I can remember has waxed lyrical about the need to raise productivity.

They seem determined to prove the old adage that there are bad chancellors and those who get out in time true. The lucky ones get to talk about soaring GDP, soaring FTSE, and shrinking interest rates, while the others are thrown to the wolves of history.

In truth, they’ve all been dismal failures. Sometimes it’s simply because they lack the wit to understand what is going on around them, sometimes it’s because they positively don’t want to know what’s going on around them, but the most tragic must surely be when they know better and go with the drift of things.

Allocate your chancellors into the category you wish, but the outcome for decades has been the same. With right to buy delivering diminishing returns these days, help to buy programmes have stepped up to deliver that illusion of progress.

The individual feels they have been given a leg up, while the market is jacked-up ready for those who follow to be trapped paying exorbitant private rents as they wait on the next help-to-buy scheme.

This public subsidy to private accumulation is clearly a farce, made all the more grotesque by government paying landlords’ mortgages for them.

According to the New Economics Foundation, the last Tory government planned to spend £70bn in housing benefit to private landlords between 2021 and 2026, over six times the £11.5bn it allocated to social housing for the same period.

In fairness, the new Labour government has pledged to increase the spend on social housing, but there seems to be no obvious willingness to change the rules of a game that only has one winner.

Scrapping right to buy is a necessity, but not even that would stop the rot. It hasn’t in Scotland, where Parliament forced — at the second time of asking — the Scottish government into declaring a national housing emergency, where over 10,000 children will spend their Christmas in temporary accommodation, and even much-needed rent control legislation excludes whole sectors and plays along with the profiteering motives that got us in the mess to begin with.

Ministers may like to talk about growing up in council housing as a badge of honour, but it’s a privilege few following them have been able to share.

Landlordism must be challenged where it stands, on rents, on conditions, on abuse; but, dare I say it, as well as being tough on landlordism, we need to be tough on its causes.

Landlordism is normalised. Daytime telly is full of programmes on how to do it, people who would regard themselves left-of-centre drift into it telling themselves it’s “our pension” and it remains easier to buy money to become a landlord than it is to borrow to actually make something useful.

A political and social economy built not even on sand, but thin air.

Throwing money at arms won’t change that, no matter what the Prime Minister, or his opposition may claim.

It’s a diversion in every sense, just like ministers tell us that “dealing” with the growing numbers signed off sick through mental illness by getting them back into work would be an inherent good, a boon for productivity and self-esteem.

It’s easier to call a whole generation workshy than to have to face the fact that a life of precarity in the home and workplace, may just have some sort of an effect on their state of mind.

To do so would be to admit that the entire national Ponzi scheme is making us poorer, sicker, and yes; less productive too.

My own productivity will shortly run to helping fit a bathroom in a home we all once owned, just like every other home in sight of it.

Just imagine that.