Watercolour feather and Believe on forearm

The gull that came through the lamp room window on Tuesday left me a feather, a long grey one with a bronze sheen where the light caught it, and I have pinned it inside the logbook because I could not think what else to do with it. Mr Pardoe says it is a sign of a bad winter. He says a great many things. The ink has gone thick with the damp, so I have been writing the weather in pencil like a schoolboy, and the nib of my good pen keeps catching on the paper.

I went up the spiral again last night to trim the wick, and the sea was the colour of a bruise going yellow at the edges. Every time the beam swept out, the spray on the rocks lit up in splashes, green and violet and a pink like the inside of a shell. I counted the stars through the glass until the cloud came over, and I thought of you saying the sky over Penzance was too low to be worth looking at.

Enclosed is the nib from the old writing set Father left me. I broke the holder cleaning the glass, so I have wrapped the nib in a scrap of oilcloth. Keep it, or throw it in the harbour, as you please. In the meantime I have chalked a word on the lintel above the door, where the men will see it each morning, because somebody ought to say it out loud up here.

Believe, it says, and I have not rubbed it off yet.