You can say that again, George thought, feeling the pressure in the air sinking round him as he listened Perhaps he should go anyway Maybe a testing gale was just what he needed. Indeed, as endings went, there were worse ways of going than being lost at sea. He poured himself two thumbs of whisky and watched the estuary below darken from grey to black."Foreign Land is a book infused with the shipping forecast. But you can find it in rock music, you can find it in poetry. Put on Blur's Parklife album and in the track This Is A Low you will find an extended metaphor using seven of the sea-area names. Dig out your Seamus Heaney and you can find a sonnet that actually begins:Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea –Green swift upsurges, North Atlantic fluxConjured by that strong gale-warningWhat's the secret? What exactly is the appeal? It is clearly complex, but we might well say the first attraction is simply the sound, the incantatory nature of the long roll-call of seemingly hallowed place-names, each one followed by a tiny but decided pause which adds a sort of reverberating tension to the reading of the list as a whole (it is the locus classicus of the semi-colon).Humber; Thames; Dover; Wight; Portland South-west 6 to gale 8, increasing severe gale 9 Occasional rain.

Good, becoming moderate.Entirely functional though the list is, it can be listened to almost as concrete poetry, like the phonetic poems of the Dadaist Hugo Ball, say (only more far more resonant for us), just as the famous and entirely functional map of the London Underground – drawn in the 1930s by Harry Beck, a young electrical draughtsman – could in its simple bright colours and strict geometry have come straight from the studio of Mondrian.A second key part of the appeal is surely the medium of delivery. Radio brings intimacy into the room: there is the voice; there are the names; there are no other distractions. With the shipping forecast, you cannot look at the weatherman and feel you don't like his tie. You are alone with the litany.Thirdly, there is the mystery and wonder of the places themselves.Viking; North Utsire; South Utsire; Fisher; German Bight. South-west 6 to gale 8, decreasing 4 or 5 for a time, perhaps increasing severe gale 9 later Rain or showers. Moderate or good.Where's Viking? Where on earth's Utsire, never mind the north bit or the south bit? Where's Fisher? What seascapes are to be found there? What images of the ocean?What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islandsWhat water lapping the bowAnd scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fogWhat images returnIt is easy to hear literary echoes, for the imagination to take flight. The photographer Mark Power was so taken with these almost mystical place-names that he spent four years trying to capture images of them all, to crystallise them out, to make them visible and tangible, and he succeeded strikingly, although for some their greatest resonance will surely remain in the mind.Fourthly, there is what we might call the listening-in-bed effect.Shannon; Rockall; Malin.

South-east veering south-west, severe gale 9 to violent storm 11 Rain then showers. Moderate or poor.If you know your Beaufort scale, you will know that with a force 3 the whitecaps are just starting to show; with force 11 almost the whole sea is white. God almighty, you wouldn't want to be out in that, you think as you switch off the radio and snuggle down under the duvet. And some poor sod undoubtedly is."I do wonder what it's like out there," says Peter Jefferson, doyen of the dozen or so Radio 4 continuity announcers whose job it is to read out the shipping forecast four times a day. "I've got today's forecast in front of me now: general gale warnings in all areas except Trafalgar, Fair Isle and Faroes. Pretty scary, really."It is carefully written by the Met Office to fill a specific time – three minutes – and there are no rules or standing instructions for reading it, he says, other than to be precise, "to make sure the sailors know what areas you're talking about." He acknowledges the strange affection in which it is held.