Stargazing. Peter Hill

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      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

       Introduction

       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 I LANDED THE JOB

       The Tavern Bar

      ‘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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