Silly lighthouse

In 1992/93, I spent a year in Normandy with my girlfriend. She wrote a novel, I made a bunch of paintings and showed them in Paris and Normandy. She worked in one end of the house, I worked in the other. (It was a 17th century woodcutter's cottage. It was awesome.) There was no phone and no tv, the internet had not yet been invented (though across France, they had a thing called Minitel, which was like the internet, kinda.) Anyway, we didn't have one of those either, just a little radio and the only English language broadcast on that little radio was to be found on BBC Radio 4, home to Desert Island Discs and plenty of other fun and informative programming, including, of course, world news.

Several times a day, however, Radio 4 broadcast the shipping forecast, to let ships in the English channel know what the conditions were. There was something both exotic and comforting about this particular broadcast, two qualities that are rarely found together. Well, naturally, I thought about the shipping forecast yesterday when someone used the word 'silly'. You see, the forecast noted conditions at a variety of locations, calling each one by name, and one of the locations was the Silly Lighthouse. I swear it was so. Silly Lighthouse. Maybe later it was Silly Lighthouse Automatic. But it was there and it was magic. Listen for yourself: (skip to 2:40)



If you want to read a swell short history of the lighthouse (picture below), click here. Oh yeah, turns out it's spelled Scilly. But it still sounds like 'silly' and that's beacon enough for goofballs everywhere. Including me.