One of the last men-only jobs left — offshore in the North Sea

As a child, I loved the Ladybird ‘People at Work’ series. I had the ones on the fireman, the policeman, the fisherman and the postman; and just one on a woman, The Nurse. Now, of course, they seem absurd. Women are doing all those ‘man’s’ jobs, and many more. So where do you go to find a men-only workplace? A monastery, maybe. Or an oil rig.

It’s not clear how Tabitha Lasley first fell in with riggers, but she was quickly enthralled. They are among the best paid blue-collar workers in the country — at the height of the North Sea oil boom even rig cleaners earned £300 a day — and they splash their money about like professional footballers on flashy clothes, state-of-the-art TVs, cocaine. ‘They were interesting. The sort of people you’d want at a house party, provided the house wasn’t yours.’

So when Lasley’s life imploded — she split with her boyfriend of five years; her laptop, carrying most of a book she’d written, was stolen — she decided to drill down. She wanted ‘to see what men are like with no women around’. Renting a dismal flat in the red-light district of Aberdeen, a city so icy in winter that even men wear gloves, she began to chat to riggers in flock-wallpapered bars as they shuttled on- and offshore. She recorded 103 interviews.

Why do the riggers speak to her? Because they’re bored, and she’s intriguing. In her early thirties, without a partner or children, she’s posh: she eats fish without a coat of batter, and buys rounds of drinks. She pops pills with the toughest of them.

Reading Lasley’s prose is like having a long conversation with someone highly intelligent, intuitive and more sensitive than she dares let on. Gradually, a picture of the riggers’ life emerges.