I’m not sure if I have told you this before. If I haven’t here it is, if I have here it is again.

In the 1980s just up the road from Tater Dhu  Lighthouse lived the author Derek Tangye, ten miles down the coast from Tater Dhu lived me. I lived and worked on the Lizard Lighthouse.

Del boy hated the Tater Dhu lighthouse because its foghorn would sound  at odd times and occasions, even when it wasn’t foggy, disrupting his peace and sleep.

Del boy loved me and my fellow lighthousekeepers on the Lizard Lighthouse, he could see our Light shining bright at night to warn mariners from the cliffs and rocks of south Cornwall and because he couldn’t hear our foghorns booming across the misty waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

What Derek did not know was that the unmanned  Tater Dhu Lighthouse was partly controlled by us on the Lizard Lighthouse. It was our job to switch on the foghorn of Tater Dhu when necessary. Now, trying to work out the visibility around Tater Dhu from ten miles away was a bit tricky so we tended to switch on the fog horn when we could not see the Tower or because of fog around us.  The visibility around Tater Dhu could be fine but we would turn on the horn anyway.  I for one would lap up the praise Derek heaped on us whilst thinking of him hating the fog horn blighting his life that we had switched on.

I liked reading his books like ‘The Cat in the Window’ ‘A Gull on the Roof’ etc but I missed the one he probably didn’t write about how that fog horn drove him mad ‘Bats in the Belfry’