Thirty-one sea areas, read clockwise from Viking, each in four unvarying parts: wind, sea state, weather, visibility. The Shipping Forecast is a liturgy with a chart behind it — the Admiralty sheet where white is deep navigable water, buff is land, and light blue marks only the shallows inside the safety contour.

This system borrows that chart's discipline. Hairline dashed boundaries, area names set in caps, depth figures in mono, nothing rounded and nothing shadowed. Colour is an event: red fills an area while a gale warning is in force, and magenta belongs to lights and beacons. Everything else is ink on paper.