This book is dedicated to:
‘The Last Lighthouse Keeper’ – wherever you are.
Shine on Brightly …
… and to my wife Sally,
both our families, and all our two-legged
and four-legged friends
Anythin’ for a quiet life, as the man said
when he took the sitivation at the lighthouse.
Charles Dickens 1812–70: The Pickwick Papers (1837)
Contents
Introduction – Ahoy!
Part One – How I Landed the Job
The Tavern Bar
The Interview
Getting There: By Train, Boat and Tractor
Part Two – Pladda: Learning the Ropes
The Mysteries of the Light Chamber
Instructions for a Nuclear War
Better than an All-Day-Breakfast
Summer of the Creep
Cooking up a Storm
A Change of Crew
Heard Chunking from Rangoon to Mandalay
Great Chieftain o’ the Pudding Race
A Brief History of Lighthouses
Shore Leave I: A Surfeit of Choice
Part Three – Ailsa Craig
Paddy’s Milestone
Rock of Ages
The Lost World
The Island Visitors
Fire bombs in Dresden – Mackerel off Ailsa Craig
Sex in the Bush
Light Without Flesh
Shore Leave II: The Edinburgh Festival
Part Four – Hyskeir
The Seamen’s Mission, Oban – The Whirleybirds
The Dalek Invasion of Hyskeir
Nautical Scrabble
Hitchcock Revisited
Postscript
Ocean Necklace
Ahoy!
In 1973 I worked as a lighthouse keeper on three islands off the west coast of Scotland. Before taking the job I didn’t really think through what a lighthouse keeper actually did. I was attracted by the romantic notion of sitting on a rock, writing haikus and dashing off the occasional watercolour. The light itself didn’t seem important: it might have been some weird coastal decoration, like candles on a Christmas tree, intended to bring cheer to those living in the more remote parts of the country.
I was nineteen when I was interviewed for the job of relief keeper by the commissioners of the Northern Lights in the New Town of Edinburgh. My hair hung well below my shoulders. I had a great set of Captain Beefheart records and I walked about with a permanent grin on my face as I had recently, finally, lost my virginity. I rolled my own cigarettes, was a member of Amnesty International and had just read Kerouac’s Desolation Angels. In short, I was eminently suitable for the job.
‘How on earth did you get a job as a lighthouse keeper?’ In the thirty-odd years since landing the job that’s been the most frequently asked question in the different parts of the world that I’ve lived and travelled. I’ve been asked by taxi drivers in Hong Kong, Tasmania, and Chicago, and at dinner parties in Paris and Sydney. ‘And what exactly do you do in a lighthouse?’ is, nine times out of ten, the follow-up question.
To answer the first question I take my interrogators back to the Tavern Bar in Dundee, a bar so wonderful that in my thoughts it is up there with the Admiral Benbow in Stevenson’s Treasure Island. In the early Seventies it was frequented by as motley a bunch of patrons as you could hope to find. Think of the inter-galactic bar in Star Wars, then add a bit of Marx Brothers slapstick, and if you know Chick Murray the genius many consider Scotland’s greatest comedian, then there’s more than a bit of him in there too. Bars are wonderful places for adventures to begin …
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