Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire...
I know I’m far from alone in feeling a little thrill whenever those words come on the radio. To the uninitiated, the Shipping Forecast can seem a little bit eccentric. Most of us, after all, aren’t the sort of salty seadogs who need to know that it’s turning cyclonic in Malin soon.
In fact, until you’ve cracked the code, the whole thing can sound like total gibberish. But the loveliest thing I’ve learnt while writing a book celebrating the forecast’s 100th birthday on the radio is that countless people get every bit as misty-eyed about it as I do. The forecast travels clockwise round Britain, starting off the coast of Norway, sneaking down the North Sea and through the Channel.
It then takes a little jaunt south to warmer climes, before rounding the west coast of Ireland and setting sail for colder waters off South-East Iceland. For every one of the 31 forecast areas, you learn everything you could possibly want to know about wind speed and direction, about weather and visibility. I do love its geekiness.
I love how clever it is at squishing so much information into just a few hundred words, using language that’s incredibly rigid and yet strangely beautiful. But its appeal is so much broader than that. The famous Romantic poet John Keats would have understood.
He wished scientists (he called them philosophers) wouldn’t “unweave a rainbow”. Which was his way of saying that sometimes we want science to explain the whys a.