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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. This week, Andrew O'Hagan is reading his piece from the current issue of the paper, a review of C-State, Tabitha Lazzley's book, about oil rig workers.

Shy Bairns Get Ne Sweets by Andrew O'Hagan.

I once asked a high-up man in British Rail if he could name the most frightening train journey

in the UK. He didn't hesitate. The last train fra Aberdeen to Glasgow

on a Friday night, he said, before adding, with some emphasis, via Dundee. In the Haiti of the

oil boom, many oil rig workers heading home after two weeks on, would pitch up for the

journey about eight pints in, with a carryout, a bag full of drink, to help end the bevy

hiatus they had suffered while in the middle of the North Sea. My British railman said the

conductors were usually too scared to ask for their tickets.

For a period in the 1970s and early 1980s, men who worked offshore enjoyed a certain rough-hewn glamour in their own communities.

They had money, new cars, and they existed at a distance from their families, living semi-independent

lives, travelling in helicopters and going on as if they were George Best in oil skins.

Forty years on, Tabitha Lassley was already working in a book about oil rig workers when she

first visited Aberdeen.

She'd recently broken up with her boyfriend, a pothead in public relations.

...