Foreword: The Shipping Forecast Puzzle Book
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The Still Small Voice of Calm
The British are an island people but it's easy to forget it it, wrapped up in our busy lives. The sea surrounds us; it provides for us, protects us and try as we might to harness it, it will always remind us that it is an untamable force of nature. It can be savage, spectacular and serene.
I was born in Lowestoft, the same fishing town as the composer Benjamin Britten, whose great work Peter Grimes traps the salt air along that stretch of Suffolk coastline in the staves of its score. Generations of my family were fishermen and the susurrating ebb and flow of tides has governed life there for centuries.
Unlike my ancestors, my 20 year professional connection with the sea doesn't get my feet wet but helps to keep those at sea safe, as a voice of the UK's Shipping Forecast, broadcast four times daily on BBC Radio 4. It is a detailed weather report for seafarers, dividing the waters around the British Isles into 31 areas with curious-sounding names: some are obvious geographical locations such as Dover, Lundy or Hebrides and others, like Forties and Dogger are more mysterious. Forties is an area of sea consistently forty fathoms deep and Dogger is a sandbank, named after the doggers, medieval Dutch fishing boats.
The forecast gives the wind direction and force, atmospheric pressure, visibility and the state of the sea. It is a nightly litany with a rhythm and indefinable poetry that have made it popular with millions of people who never have cause to put to sea and have little idea what it actually means; a reminder that whilst you're tucked-up safely under the bedclothes, far out over the waves it’s a wilder and more dangerous picture, one that captures the imagination and leads it into unchartered waters whilst you sleep. Dependable, reassuring and never hurried, in these especially uncertain times The Shipping Forecast is a still small voice of calm across the airwaves.
When I began reading the forecast it arrived in the studio via a noisy telex printer that laboriously churned out the data on a roll of flimsy thermal paper. If the paper ran-out, you had to call the MET Office and ask them to re-send it, which could be perilously close to broadcast. I then had to separate the two-metre long printout into its constituent parts: Shipping Forecast, Coastal Stations and Inshore Waters by carefully tearing it with a ruler against the desk and fastening each sheet with paperclips to pieces of cereal-box cardboard (kept expressly in the studio for this purpose) so it didn't rustle whilst being read. It was all very endearingly low-tech, just as one would hope.
In this delightful book, Alan Connor embraces that idiosyncratic history and impishly crafts a cryptic voyage of the mind around each sea area. It is a heroic and highly skilful feat of quizmastery, widening your general and nautical knowledge along the way. The ideal gift for radio lovers, sea dogs and puzzle fiends and I sincerely hope you enjoy making the journey as much as I have.
Wrap up, it's stormy out there!
Zeb Soanes, London, 2020