This one came from Darla, my Postal Pal in California. Her second lighthouse for me this week, and her second English one.
Last time it was Ramsgate. This time she has gone north, to St Mary’s Island at Whitley Bay, just up the coast from the mouth of the Tyne.
St Mary’s is only an island some of the time. A short causeway runs out to it across the rocks, and twice a day the sea closes over it. You check the tide before you walk out, and you keep an eye on your watch once you are there.
The tower went up in 1898. White, tapering, about 46 metres tall, with 137 steps to the top. Long before it, the monks of Tynemouth are said to have kept a lantern burning here to warn ships off the rocks.
It burned paraffin until 1977, the last Trinity House light still running on oil. Five years later it was automated. In 1984 the light went out for good.
A friend of mine was once a keeper here.
The card is called St Mary’s Lighthouse Reflections. Low tide, the causeway dry, a cyclist heading out towards the tower.
Four stamps. A saw-whet owl. The Capitol dome, with the right of the people peaceably to assemble printed round the edge. A 1992 dollar stamp of Queen Isabella pledging her jewels to pay for Columbus. And Edgar Allan Poe.
Poe is the one that made me smile. The last thing he is thought to have worked on, in 1849, was a story called The Light-House. A keeper’s diary, alone on a rock. He never finished it.
What a lovely stamp it is. It came out in January 2009, for the two hundredth anniversary of his birth, from a portrait Michael Deas painted in oils on a wooden panel. The dark coat, the loosened tie, those tired eyes. And his signature running along the bottom.
Along the top, the row of little weather symbols. She has circled the sun, like last time. Above it, in her hand, the date and the temperature. 38.9°C. In October.
So a grey Northumberland afternoon reached me by way of a Californian heatwave. A reflection is the same thing, seen from somewhere else.
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