Peter Collyer

An inexplicable attachment to the shipping forecast - the four daily reports on weather at sea that go out on Radio 4 - is quintessentially British. It doesn’t matter that most of us live inland and that cheap flights have made going out in a boat a rarity; we like to know what’s going on at sea. Even changing the time of broadcast resulted in a deluge of complaints - there is no discussion of cancelling it, although most ships have access to up-to-the-minute information on-board from other sources.

This coffee table book is delightful, channelling the national attachment and matching it with evocative watercolour paintings and affectionate travel notes that give you itchy feet to see places for yourself. I had no idea that there was an Open Air Rain Museum (tongue-in-cheek much?) in Bergen (or that it rains 290 days of the year there) and there are similarly entertaining notes for most ports of call. I rather regret that the author didn’t follow through on his whim to add food notes for breakfast and fish and chips forecasts for each area.

However, there is a stunning painting of the sea or coast (complete with shipping forecast for the day) and a secondary painting or line drawing representing an aspect of local life for every current (and two past) shipping forecast regions and coastal weather stations. Given the Shipping Forecast covers the broader seas around Britain, this is a tiny view into the coastal life of Norway, Iceland, the Faeroes, the UK, Ireland, France, Holland, Spain and France - as well as our offshore islands - and amply illustrates the incredible variety and beauty of our coasts.

I could wish that the images were bigger or that the book was landscape to match their format (rather than square, reducing their size). But the hazy views of light rippling on waves and suggestions on the horizon are enchanting. Don’t expect anything iconic to separate the sea areas - one patch of sea looks much like another - but for lovers of wind and wave, this is a treat. For the coastal paintings, this book reminded me that I do love watercolours after all (although I wouldn't choose to put them on my wall), and that there's a lot of variety in the type of painting you can produce with them. There's some beautiful work in here, and as it's often of my favourite subjects (cliffs, mountains, sea, clouds), I'm not biased at all.… (mehr)