Having a  2000w light bulb in the room above your bedroom , tracking around and around ,  Spilling its light in all directions can make it difficult to sleep. But you get used to it. The whirring of the mechanism that keeps it spinning rocks  you to sleep, unless of course the weather outside has other ideas.

She'd been here with her father for six months and now The lighthouse was being upgraded so that no more little families would be needed to keep in working. That meant she would be the last ever little girl to sleep under the spinning lamp right at the top of the structure.


Her room was full of old dark brown furniture , built so that it fitted snugly into the the curve of the walls, apart from her bed that was right in the middle of the room . From it she could see out of two windows , both unsurprisingly had sea views. The walls were thick and the window glass was thick as well and not always clean , this meant you had to be purposeful about looking out of them , neither accommodated casual glances. She was looking forward to having a bedroom where is as possible to have a less intense relationship with the  windows.

Men refitting the light house were replacing the light , the mechanism , some other things that were spoken about over the phone long distance a lot and the Heath Robison, apparently that's who makes them, arrangement of  small mirrors  and buzzers that managed to wake daddy if the light went out.  We could always look out of the complicated windows of course and this the engineers weren't proposing to change except of course , soon, there would be no one here to look.

Food came packed in a cardboard box, delivered fresh every  couple of weeks or so. Fuel for heating came on alternate weeks  and school was delivered  the same way.  School was administered by her father , as he like to put it, for three hours every week after breakfast. The idea was that they covered the same ground  as the  kids in the local school. Local in as much as it was on the only landmass  visible on the horizon on a clear day.

Her father had terrible taste in music . His record collection had required two additional trips by the boatmen who  first brought them over.  He had thousands of them and played them  through a elaborate series of boxes and cables that took up most of the space on the ground floor. One of the refit engineers also loved music and all the  boxes that it came with and him her father would listen to jazz and drink  special whisky from the mainland.