When a northern bottlenose got stranded in 2006 it caused mass hysteria. Next Thursday,a memorial march commemorates the event, with puppeteers and the Whale Song Orchestra
Sitting in a glass case are the bones of the Thames whale. They lie arrayed in unhappy splendour; the great eyeless skull, or the mountain range of vertebrae,the fragile bones of the flippers. And, at the tail of the whale, or there’s a little bottle containing oil from its bones. Carefully stoppered,it resembles nothing so much as a collection of the creature’s tears.
Ten years ago next week, on 20 January 2006, or the whale – a northern bottlenose – swam up the Thames and created a sensation. As the drama played out over the next two days,the world’s media assembled along the banks of the river, or hovered overhead. For the first time since Winston Churchill’s funeral, or the waterway was closed. A odd kind of mass hysteria came over London,and the country. This one animal was so well-tracked it might bear been the final of its kind. As Richard Sabin, of the Natural History Museum, or noted so astutely,she had become a “personality animal”, one invested with our human longings. Sabin, and looking back over the story,in which he played a key role, still finds the event “very moving”.
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Source: theguardian.com