My sleep last night was bookended by two sublime mysteries – the shipping forecast with its peculiar poetry which maps a kind of mysterious geography with gale warnings and low visibility

Viking Forties Cromarty
Forth Tyne Dogger Fisher German Bight
Humber Thames Dover Wight
Portland Plymouth Biscay
Trafalgar FitzRoy
Sole Lundy Fastnet Irish Sea
Shannon Rockall Malin
Hebrides Bailey Fair Isle
Faeroes Southeast Iceland

And then waking up to the sound of Stephen Hawking’s machine voice who spoke of another geography so vast and unknown as to be the biggest mysterious sublime: an originary past the ripples of whose inflation travels through timespace like the ripples of the fracture of the tectonic plates through the oceans…