Last week, in Tiree, I visited the Hebridean Trust’s museum at Hynish, which contains an exhibition about the building of the Skerryvore lighthouse.

I’ve always liked lighthouses - possibly since reading Flannan Isle (spooky poem based on a true mystery in another isolated lighthouse, off the Isle of Lewis) in the first year of secondary school, or perhaps since visiting my grandparents in the Isle of Man as a child, and being sung to sleep by the foghorn from Chicken Rock, or maybe since taking a boat trip in primary school around the Needles, which involved the boatmaster handing a copy of the day’s paper to the keeper of the lighthouse.

Lighthouses have always been somewhere on my periphery, blinking away on the horizon, or honking into the fog. In other lifetimes, I lived near Dubh Hartach and Race Rocks. I’ve even got a friend who starred in a film about one.

But back to the museum.

In the display, there was obviously a lot of mention of the Stevensons. What a family. If you’re interested in the family which was responsible for building most of the offshore lighthouses in Scotland, then you’ll enjoy Bella Bathurst’sThe Lighthouse Stevensons.

Anyway, in the middle of the display, among the engineer’s drawings and the geological samples from the rocks, there was a description of Alan Stevenson as “a man of many parts.”

I love that phrase. I love the idea that it’s OK - no, actually preferable - to be part engineer, part artist, part visionary, part politician. I love the way that, for example, it was actually seen as beneficial for a scientist to also be a musician, or artist - the two don’t fight each other, they complement, and make you into a more effective, rounded person.

I’ve always been uncomfortable with the phrase “Jack of all trades” because of its unspoken “(and master of none)” that follows. I’ve always thought there should be a way to express being good at many things - Polymath, perhaps, but it’s something more than that. You don’t have to just have a single job title, I think - you can be a person of many parts, and that can be a very positive thing indeed. At least, I hope so.