Today on New Year’s Day 2025 it is the 100th year anniversary of the Shipping Forecast. New Year’s day has such an unusual felt sense – one of perhaps the doldrums after the storms and squally showers of Christmas and social celebrations. Don’t get me wrong, I love storms and squally showers as long as I’m experiencing them from behind a window – similarly with socialising, I love these gatherings as long as I can experience them from behind the structure of board games and with the hope that these events aren’t too long for my body to cope with. I no longer feel bad for leaving a party when I want to!
Anyway – the doldrums of New Year’s Day. That day when everything is over, and the tables are full of left-over food and empty bottles, the unwashed up flotsam and jetsam after the storm. I am happy to be in these doldrums – to be in the peace of it. And I’ve filled up that peace today with listening to all the programmes on Radio 4 celebrating the Shipping Forecast. I guess you could call it a mini special-interest for today!
I find that when I get into something like this, my mind wanders into that creative state of reflection, which is why I find myself here at my laptop now writing! I found myself rabbit-holing into Shipping Forecast lore. I never know quite what I’m rabbit-holing for but somehow I always manage to stumble upon a thought that was there all along, I was just trying to find it.
What I found was a thought about how autistic people are incorrectly stereotyped as always needing clarity and specific black and white answers… I just want to say about this - for me, some of this is true some of the time. I do like clarity and I do like truth and I do like specificity, but there is a BIG BUT here. I also love, love, love, love, love mystery.
So here is the beautiful paradox of being autistic – (and this is for my autistic profile, and may not be for all, which goes without saying every time statements are made about being autistic)…
…the beautiful paradox of being autistic for me is that at one and the same time, I love clarity and I love mystery.
So what has this got to do with the Shipping Forecast? Well, the Shipping Forecast is also a beautiful paradox in its specificity, clarity and mystery.
There is the challenge for forecasters in attaining specificity when they are dealing with weather and water systems interacting:
“But of course the weather is part of a bigger picture of atmospheric chaos which is interacting with ocean chaos, and it is these two fluids which are constantly interacting in a perpetual transfer of energy and momentum across those fluids across the globe. And given the complexity of every molecule of air and water doing a different thing it’s a wonder we ever get the forecast right to be perfectly honest.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0026rpf
Then this forecast is crystallised into the list of locations which feel both nebulous and intriguing – Fair Isle, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger etc:
“marine forecasts cover large sea areas some with complicated stretches of coast. The wind can vary from force 3 outside the Dart to force 6 off Bolt Head, in about 15 miles and 3 hours. Imagine the length and complexity of the forecast if all such details was included for even the 12 hours ahead from ‘Lands End to Lyme Regis including the Isles if Scilly.”
“It does not help anyone if the forecaster tries to be more definite than he really can be. The forecaster does not like using words such as ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘locally’, but it is all too often necessary if he is to convey the possibility in a sensible manner, achieve a script that is not so long that it becomes meaningless”.
https://weather.mailasail.com/franks-weather/marine-weather-forecast-terms
As I read these words, so many thoughts come to mind about this continuing paradox of how it is to be autistic and what secrets are held within the Shipping Forecast about being autistic. It’s so strange how the autistic mind works. Do you find, when reading the quotes above, that the same thing happens to you? That your mind pings off into different thoughts and reflections in a sort of hyper connected flow state?
The thoughts that come are…
How when I listen to the Shipping Forecast I have this felt sense of being so comforted by the solidity of being in my safe place at home while knowing that somewhere out there, out at sea there are gales in North Utsire and South Utsire. Something about how the neurotypical world can often feel like being battered by gales and how the home is my neurodivergent safe place, not just for me but for my whole neurodivergent family.
I think about how much the unknown is something I will conquer by using google street view to plot a journey if I’m going somewhere new, but that I can revel in the unknown if it sits within poetry like the Shipping Forecast. It’s a safe sort of unknown, a safe sort of mystery that is just beautiful to be immersed in.
I also think about how the Shipping Forecast could be seen as a meditation on how maybe we can, as autistic people, learn to lean into the greys of life, rather than always trap ourselves in needing black and white answers. There is a ‘perhaps’, a ‘possibly’ in the forecast and that vagueness is appropriate. It tells us that we, as human beings cannot ultimately control everything. To live an authentic autistic life is to tenuously balance the experience of rolling in and out of chaos and routine.
Nowhere do we see this more than during the Christmas break – I spent a lot of time in the run up to Christmas talking with many clients about how they might put in buffers to help them withstand the disruption to their internal weather systems!
And so now, I’ll end there. With final words from today’s Shipping Forecast:
It’s time now for the Shipping Forecast Issued by the Met office on behalf of the Maritime Coastguard Agency At 0505 on Wednesday 1st January. There are warnings of gales in all areas except Trafalgar The general synopsis at midnight,Low,North Itsiere 986 moving steadily away East The area forecast for the next 24 hours
Viking: Gale North Itsiere northerly 6 to gale 8, Squally snow showers, good, occasionally poor….
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