Adventures in intangible forecasts

‘Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer — Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre’. Excerpt from Prayer by Carol Ann Duffy

Sea Areas around the British Isles

January has started cold this year, although has brought some of my favourite winter weather for beach visits. That is bright sunshine but with an icy air that makes you pull on wooly layers along with your sunglasses. As regulars here might know, I am at my happiest when staring out at sea. Although there’s an irony to be found in my wobbly legs on water, so instead I prefer to appreciate it from the land. My location in Wales now gives me some new coastlines to explore and areas to look out on: mainly Lundy and if I am out and about, the Irish Sea.

These names are familiar to those that live in the UK, even if we haven’t visited them, thanks primarily to the lilting lullaby of the shipping forecast. Broadcast on BBC R4 four times a day ( MET office standard issuing) it moves the listener through 31 sea areas hemmed in by the Atlantic giving: ‘updates on gale warnings in force, a general synopsis and sea-area forecasts containing wind direction and force, sea state, weather and visibility’ and offers much comfort to those that listen on land and key information to those at sea. Now in its centenary year it’s only fitting that at the beginning of 2024 it was nominated by the C20 Society for status as an asset of intangible cultural heritage as part of an ongoing UK Government consultation:

“One of the key criteria for Intangible Heritage assets to be included on the UNESCO list is that the activity should ‘contribute to giving us a sense of identity and continuity’ which the shipping forecast certainly does. Initially a utilitarian service for a specific minority, it’s been adopted as a much loved emotional comfort blanket by a broader demographic – who never go to sea. It’s a poetic reverie and symbol of national caring, whilst at the same time a reminder of our geographical isolation and the uncontrollable power of natural phenomena.” (Catherine Croft, Director, C20 Society)

Along with the shipping forecast other suggested nominations are a bit of a rag tag bunch including pantomime, pub culture, sea shanties, cèilidh and calligraphy. It will be interesting to see what outcome the consultation brings.

Map of the Winds
Jan Janssonius, 1650

I have no idea why listening to the shipping forecast is so relaxing, hypnotic even. As an island nation that as Gavin Francis notes is ‘protected by a circumference of sea’ perhaps there’s something fundamental about floating away on the descriptions of the water and weather that surround us, near yet far. The technical information both slightly impenetrable unless you’re a sailor but also somehow fundamental. You know that when you hear a warning that’s higher than 8, you’re in for a stormy ride (well, so long as you’re somewhat familiar with Beaufort wind force scales). Take a recent forecast at the time of writing for Lundy, the area closest to me, from the Met office:

WIND: South or southwest 6 to gale 8, increasing severe gale 9 at times. SEA STATE: Rough or very rough. WEATHER: Rain or showers. VISIBILITY: Moderate or good, occasionally poor.

Reading the words doesn’t quite have the same affect though. It’s when you hear it through the radio while cosy indoors, under a duvet, your imagination can roam. I think about it coming through a tinny speaker in a boat, bobbing up and down, isolated and anchored in the middle of dark, expansive seas. As the forecast moves around the different areas it soon becomes a deeply familiar incantation, a new folk charm, a spell for sailors.

It’s also interesting how the sea has been divided into a sort of imaginary map in and of itself although there is always a tie to the land somehow, an invisible thread that binds sea to shore. I found a very helpful factsheet produced by the MET office here which gives the history and lists the areas and why they have their names, which have changed and expanded over the years. Some are obvious (names of actual places like Cromarty, Dover) others a bit more obscure (Viking, Sole, named after sandbanks). This also brings a sort of magic to the forecast when it’s spoken.

Just because we name it though, doesn’t mean we know it. Some places are deeply familiar such as famous rivers and estuaries (Thames, Tyne and Forth) but it’s the distant ones that spark something in me like North and South Utsire (an island off the coast of Norway). In one breath we can move quickly from the familiar to the unknown, which I guess you could say is kind of the wonder of the sea itself. Like the feeling when you are swimming and all of a sudden the shoreline shelf disappears under your feet and you’re alone in the water. No land for comfort.

The forecast has a practical purpose yes, but also evokes much in the imagination of the listener, the reason I suppose it has provoked many creative responses. I particularly like the melancholic song ‘This is a Low’ by Blur on their 1994 album Parklife which chugs like an old trawler around the UK coastline. Here ‘the low’ referencing both atmospheric pressure as well as the mood of Damon Albarn as he delivers the lines:

And into the sea
Goes pretty England and me
Around the Bay of Biscay
And back for tea

Hit traffic on the Dogger bank
Up the Thames to find a taxi rank
Sail on by with the tide and go to sleep
And the radio says

This is a low
But it won’t hurt you
When you are alone
It will be there with you
Finding ways to stay solo

(Excerpt ‘This is a Low’ Songwriters: Damon Albarn, David Rowntree, Steven Alexander James, Graham Leslie Coxon)

Parklife is a record that explored (and often skewered) the cultural experience and meaning of Britishness, particularly Englishness in the 1990s so it’s not a surprise that the shipping forecast features, and comes at the end of the album as a sort of wistful sigh in comparison to the frenetic early paced offerings. The song casts off into the horizon in a haze of guitar fuzz, mimicking the sound of a boat engine disappearing into the distance.

In the late (00.48) broadcast the shipping forecast is accompanied by music too. At the beginning a musical theme called ‘Sailing By’ written by composer Ronald Binge is played. This had a practical application: it was intended it as a piece to allow sailors to immediately recognize R4 when they tuned in. Yet with its gentle waltz tempo and soaring woodwind flourishes, it also transports the listener to somewhere else entirely, more mystical, a place to drift off as the daily seaward incantation begins once more. To end then, an evocative traditional Gaelic folk charm, featured in Gavin Francis’ book ‘Island Dreams‘ from the islands between Scotland and Ireland:

“May I be an island in the sea, may I be a hill on land, may I be a star when the moon wanes, may I be a staff to the weak one: I shall wound every man, no man shall wound me.”

Mystical Shore Edvard Munch, 1897 Source