Let’s get the embarrassing admission out of the way: when I first heard that the inaugural Maeve Binchy Travel Award was open for submissions my initial response was a mental shrug. I couldn’t think of where to go.
I have never compiled a secret holiday bucket list, and apart from the occasional sigh over the travel pages it was a long time since I had acted on what John Steinbeck called the virus of restlessness.
Luckily for me my second reaction was, Don’t be such a doofus: there must be a gazillion places you’d like to go. I was at University College Dublin at the time, and the €4,000 bursary, set up to fund a travel opportunity that would enhance creative writing, was open to students of its college of arts and Celtic studies.
Because the award was set up to commemorate Maeve Binchy’s writing as well as her love of travel, simply getting the maps out and choosing a destination didn’t feel like the right approach. It was her summer at a kibbutz in Israel, in 1963, that kick-started Binchy’s career: her father so enjoyed her letters home that he typed them up and sent them to a newspaper.
I love Binchy’s journalism for its unashamed, elbows-on-the-table interest in people’s daily lives. So I wanted an opportunity to connect with people I would never otherwise encounter. And later that day, when I was listening to the BBC shipping forecast, as I occasionally do for no reason other than a love of its pared-back, evocative rhythms – Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: any fan knows the drill – I realised exactly what I’d like to do.
The shipping forecast is a series of weather reports and forecasts broadcast four times a day on BBC Radio 4. Its 31 sea areas are listed in a roughly clockwise direction, beginning with Viking, off the coast of Norway. The forecast wraps around Ireland and Britain and stretches as far as the coast of Spain before heading north again, to finish in the icy waters off southeast Iceland.
Broadcast almost uninterrupted for 90 years, the shipping forecast is more than a practical service for those at sea: it has become a cultural institution. Seamus Heaney, Charlie Connolly, Blur and Radiohead are a few of the many who have drawn on it for inspiration.
My proposal, The General Synopsis at Midnight, was to explore the forecast via the 31 sea areas. When I heard I'd won I realised the best place to begin wasn't at sea at all but at the Met Office HQ, in Exeter.
One afternoon last July I pulled up a chair at the desk of Craig Snell, a maritime forecaster – no relation to Binchy's husband, Gordon Snell – for a preview of that afternoon's weather. Snell's priority when writing a forecast is to find what will have the most impact, "to concentrate on the things that would affect life".
As a jobbing copywriter myself I was impressed by its rigorous format: each must be as close to 350 words as possible – 370 for the late-night broadcast, as it alone covers Trafalgar – and the palette of words to draw from is tiny. Visibility, for example, can be nothing other than good, moderate, poor or very poor. Watching Snell make every word work hard for its keep reminded me of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass.
Beginning with that visit to Exeter, I wrote a blog about my travels, real and fictional, through the 31 areas. I brought a copy of Maeve's Times, Binchy's selected Irish Times articles, with me. I think I was hoping that the way she approached the world might rub off on me, even a little.
Highlights included a night at Fastnet Rock lighthouse, thanks to the Commissioners of Irish Lights. I hadn’t been there long before I understood why Fastnet’s attendant, Neilly O’Reilly, had remarked earlier that day, “They had to make lighthouses functional, but they didn’t have to make them so beautiful.”
Another memory that stands out is a conversation I had on St Agnes, the southernmost populated island of the Isles of Scilly. In 1707 Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell lost his fleet of four ships to the rocks off Scilly because he couldn’t understand which direction they were heading in. Not a good outcome for him yet a happy ending for us: the Board of Longitude was established as a result.
While waiting for a boat I got talking to the owner of the only buildings on Gugh, a tiny island beside St Agnes that has been uninhabited since Neolithic times. In the 1920s an eccentric Irish surveyor decided to build a barn and a house on Gugh. He is there still, buried at the prow of the island, facing out to sea and standing up. He was quite a short chap, the current owner remarked, so we decided it probably wasn’t as tricky a burial as it first sounded.
I finished writing about the last of the sea areas while listening to a lunchtime broadcast last November. It was a completely different experience now that I had my own pictures to put with the names in the forecast.
At the word Sole I was back on Scilly, wondering where the invisible point in the water is at which Sole, Lundy and Fastnet greet each other. At Faeroes, southeast of Iceland, I pretended to be on a boat in the ninth century, determined to find a land that supposedly didn’t exist. With Cromarty, Forth and Fair Isle I was driving through the Shetlands in the rain, chasing distant, ever-shifting grey hills as darker hills echoed behind them.
As I listened to that shipping forecast I wished I could have met Maeve Binchy, to tell her about what I saw and the people I met. To tell her what I’ve learned most of all: that the world is bursting with stories.At the bottom of every sea, in the tiniest streets of every town, on every blank windswept beach. But as the forecast ended and I switched off the radio I realised something: she already knew that.
Henrietta McKervey is the author of What Becomes of Us (Hachette) and winner of the 2015 First Fiction Hennessy Literary Award. This year’s recipient of the Maeve Binchy Travel Award will be announced in June
