An ode to lamplighting

00:00 06:32

Christopher Howse has narrated this article for you to listen to.

I was growing impatient with a recent blog by Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, promising progress, universal prosperity, ‘a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics’ through artificial intelligence. I won’t go over that ground now, because I suddenly sat up at a passing remark he made: ‘Nobody is looking back at the past, wishing they were a lamplighter.’

Stephen’s task for Paddington council was to cycle round with his ladder fixing street lamps on the blink

I’m not so sure. I used to know a lamplighter and I miss his company. His name was Stephen Fothergill, and in the 1980s he was a welcome sight in the French pub in Dean Street, Soho, late in the evening. Tall and grey-haired with a sharp nose that often seemed nipped with cold, he would be dressed in a long drab raincoat. He spoke quietly and occasionally laughed lightly with a noise a little less than a snort.

He stood at the so-called ‘deep end’ of the pub, the north side of the little interior, where poets and painters talked and shouted, leaving the copywriters and what he called the ‘pornocrats’ at the shallow end.

He drank bitter beer in half-pints (the landlord Gaston Berlemont in any case refusing to serve pints). It was easier to hear Stephen when the underground-train intensity of crowding had thinned out, on a Sunday night perhaps.

He became a lamplighter in the 1950s while learning the trumpet in his spare time. His special task for Paddington council was to cycle round with his ladder dealing with street lamps on the blink. The short ladder, like a window cleaner’s, reached the crossbar on the lamppost.

Gas streetlights have a relative beauty, like steam trains. I mean that when gaslight was introduced, some resented its artificial glare, just as some hated railways cutting through the countryside.