Time for bed
One of the happiest memories I have of the two fairly purgatorial years I spent in Manchester is shuffling off to bed each night and listening to Sailing By and the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4.
Few pieces of music convey such an overwhelming sense of all being well in the world than Sailing By. (There’s something symbolic, I think, in the fact that in the two years I was listening the only night that the BBC didn’t play even a snippet of Sailing By was the night that the Iraq War began.) And the stolid Reithian cadences and meteorological incantations of the Shipping Forecast is so powerfully hypnotic that it has insinuated itself into the minds of drowsy writers, poets and musicians and wormed its way into songs and poetry (Seamus Heaney’s The Shipping Forecast is a favourite).
And now through the magic of the “Internet”, you can have this small slice of the radio frequency that will always be Britain, any time of day or night in the form of Permanent Bedtime.
Via Warren Ellis.
