Often, I find myself washing-up late at night.

I quite enjoy it, with no-one around and Radio 4 playing in the background. I particularly like it after midnight when the shipping forecast is aired.

I’ve always been fascinated by the sea and ships and find it wonderful to be able to listen to warnings of gales, squally showers and occasional rain for vessels far out at sea, while at home in my kitchen, my feet firmly on dry land.

I love the descriptions: fog patches becoming moderate or poor; wind for a time; veering north or north-west; rough; very rough. The worse the forecast, the luckier I feel to be stuck at my sink and not staggering around on a trawler being tossed about on enormous waves.

York Press:

A fishing boat braves the seas

Listeners, I am sure, like to hear about approaching storms - I know I do. The worse the approaching weather system, the more we lap it up. Of course we feel for the vessels battling hurricane force winds and poor visibility, but what can we do - we are hundreds of miles away, cosied up at home supping hot chocolate, and - as harsh as it sounds - it’s not our problem.

Making complete sense to those at sea, some shipping forecast expressions are a complete mystery to the rest of us. I always wonder what is the difference between air pressure ‘falling slowly’ and ‘falling more slowly’. How big a gulf is that little word ‘more’ does it mean your ship could be sucked into a maelstrom any second? How soon is ‘soon’, and how late is ‘later’? My favourite unfathomable, posh-sounding expression has to be falling ‘rather quickly’.

In my early teens I used to know the forecast’s carved up zones of water off by heart: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger... it’s as soothing as a lullaby, and as a child I regularly fell asleep to it, although that’s probably more to do with the time of night I had illicitly stayed awake until.

I like the idea of the unmanned automatic light vessels: Sandettie, Greenwich, and Channel, bobbing about on their own out at sea. Sandettie? North of Calais and east of the Strait of Dover. It’s a great geography lesson.

I love the shipping forecast as it combines my two passions - the sea and the weather. For years we holidayed by the sea, where I loved to sit and watch the ocean at night, with the occasional lights from passing ships, and in my youth I used to love visits to the atmospheric South Gare near Redcar, where we would watch giant tankers entering and leaving Teesport.

Sadly, a long-held ambition to be a meteorologist failed due to mathematical incompetence, and I resorted to journalism instead.

Now you can listen to the shipping forecast at any time of day. YouTube is awash with recitations of the shipping forecast, read by the likes of Stephen Fry and Alan Bennett.

As a relaxation tool it can only be topped by it’s ultra-sophorific Radio 4 shipmate, ‘Sailing By’.