The Lighthouse Stevensons - Bella Bathurst [135]
Now there are plenty who claim that the lights have outlived their role. The same remote-controlled microchips that check the weather, measure the wind-speed and switch on the lights have also made those lights redundant. Computers and satellite systems can guide a sailor round the world, plot his course, fix the longitude, pilot the boat and find a route to safety without ever resorting to something as sweetly antique as a lighted tower on a headland. The world has come full circle – from darkness to light and back again. But to most sailors the lights remain necessary pleasures. They have become devices of last resort, used, in the old fashioned manner, when other methods have failed. They may have been superseded by technology, but that technology does not take kindly to force-10 gales and flooding waves. If it collapses, as it often does, there must be other methods and older forms of guidance. Which is why the first thing that a sailor will see as he fumbles through the darkness towards Britain is still a beam sweeping over the water, shining out the same false dawn. The sea is a tameable thing, and the lights have made it safe.
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