Book description
When Peter Hill, a student at Dundee College of Art, answered an advert
in The Scotsman seeking lighthouse keepers, little did he imagine that
within a month he would be living with three men he didn't know in a
lighthouse on Pladda, a small remote island off the west coast of
Scotland. Hill was nineteen, it was 1973 and, with his head fed by
Vietnam, Zappa, Kerouac, Vonnegut, Watergate and Coronation Street, he
spent six months on various lighthouses, "keeping" with all
manner of unusual and fascinating people. Within thirty years this way
of life was to have disappeared entirely. The resulting book is a
charming and beautifully written memoir that is not only a heartfelt
lament for Hill's own youth and innocence but also for a simpler and
more honest age. What makes Stargazing such a beautiful book is that
it is more than an elegy to a vanished profession. It is a elegy to
youth and to the constellation of dreams, ambitions and anxieties that
is more intense at 19 than it can ever be again.
