Radio 4‘s Shipping Forecast is always cryptic at best, but this phrase added a beautifully surreal touch to tonight’s broadcast. The “1007″ bit was pronounced “one thousand and seven”; it doesn’t refer to something that will happen shortly after ten o’clock. Obviously it makes sense to someone. I always fondly imagine legions of identically weather-beaten, bearded types clutching identical helms as the spray crashes relentlessly over the bow, and muttering grimly from underneath their identical sou’westers as their battered old wirelesses crackle with the specially coded message that the weather’s about to go from shitty to really shitty. And somewhere out to starboard, being tossed about like a kitten’s jingly ball by the evil, black swell, I imagine a solitary buoy – half red and half white, with perhaps a little flashing light on top. Despite years of erosion from the salt water, four digits are still just about readable, painted across the fattest circumference of the buoy: its identification mark, “1007″. As the fishing boat passes close, Low Fisher buoy 1007 catches just the briefest glimpse of a lit window, and a pipe jutting from a steely jaw. When the next wave drops it’s closer still, and this time he can make out a huge bunch of knuckles that grip the wheel and somehow manage to steer the tiny boat through the worst the North Sea can throw at it. The knuckles belong to solid, meaty, sweating, tattooed hands; sailor’s hands; man‘s hands. And at that moment, as the next wave rises and turns those two flashes of nautical masculinity into nothing more than cruel memories, Low Fisher 1007 is sucked into a maelstrom of gender confusion, and suddenly imagines himself to be white and pink, with his numbers re-painted all fresh, and perhaps some nice curtains, and to no longer be a buoy, but to be thought of by one and all as a guirl.