
Long reads shortened
A hypnotic ode to the sea
To help me sleep at night, says Grace Linden in The New York Times, I’ve started listening to compilations of the Shipping Forecast. Although each broadcast lasts only a minute or two – the maximum is 380 words, apparently – when you play lots in a row they become “poetic and hypnotic, a free-form ode to the seas”. You start in Viking, an area of the sea up near the Orkney islands, then go on “a kind of audio tour” around the British Isles. The phrases take on an oddly rhythmic quality: “Wight, Portland, Biscay”; “good, occasionally poor, becoming very poor at times in Plymouth”; “low southeast Iceland, 1,000, losing its identity by the same time”.