lampseeker

There is something joyful about leaning into a niche and all-consuming obsession. Not an actor or a Netflix show or a new restaurant, but something bizarre and outwardly incomprehensible. The older I get, the more able I feel to lean into these strange obsessions, from bats to bell-ringing, and over the last few months it has been lighthouses.

View from the lighthouse in Dungeness.

It started when my mum recommended me a fictionalized account of the disappearence of three lighthouse keepers in the 80s - The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex. In the endnotes the author thanked an anthropology of lighthouse keepers by Tony Parker, which I then marched through on trains, sofas, in bed while my partner slept next to me. I learned about the three different sorts of lighthouses (land light, rock light, tower light), the routines they required, the men that tended them before the final automation in 1980. I purchased a Pulitzer Prize winner by Annie Proulx, for its lighthouse-adorned bookjacket spied on a friend’s Instagram story. (It was not in any way related to ligthouses, but a great read nonethless.) I ordered a fantasy history book by Natasha Pulley, inspired purely by the tower etched in gold on the cover, and was so gripped by a world built around a light off the Scottish coast that I more than once found myself turning pages in a freezing bath.

I watched The Lighthouse, and then The Vanishing, listened to Irish horror fiction set at sea, trawled Wikipedia for instances of keeper disappearances and grisly happenings. I looked at lighthouse Airbnbs (bankbreakingly expensive) and visiting opportunities (mainly accessible by car). I painted lighthouse watercolours, etched one into a banana; H got me a set of lighthouse stickers which went on my laptop, my phone, my diary. What is better than an all-consuming obsession that your loved ones participate in too.

I’ve been considering the occasions when I’ve been in proximity to lighthouses before they took this sheen. Beachy Head, a matchstick viewed from the Seven Sisters cliffs in Sussex. The land light glimpsed from afar in Berwick-on-Tweed, during a 3 hour visit on the drive down from Edinburgh half a decade ago, looking at Lowry views and listening to the accents of pint-drinkers in Wetherspoons for a theatre role (my companions’s, not mine). The view out over shingle wasteland in Dungenness from an old lantern room, reached by a winding climb through what would have been bedrooms and kitchen and living quarters.

I feel nourished by the moments of joy that a new obsession brings. I gasp involuntarily in an empty cinema at a scene in which the lighthouse keepers’ anthem is sung aloud; light up unwrapping a porcelain fridge magnet from my aunt, a tiny painted lighthouse nestled within Dutch landscape.

I write this from Seoul, South Korea. I’m debating spending money and time from my limited supplies of both on an overnight trip to the second city of Busan, home to lighthouses many and various. What will lighthouses mean to me in 5 years, in 5 months even? Does it matter? If one is lucky enough to be able to organise life around things that spark joy in the moment, is it not reason enough to do so?

Not sure. Will let you know.