Daryl & Heather Overland

Our trip to London for Gary's birthday took a turn for the unusual on Saturday when a whale decided to swim up the Thames, highlighting both our emotional bond to wildlife, and the increasing obesity problem in the UK ("See kids, if you don't exercise and cut back on the KFC, your lungs will be crushed under the weight of your own blubber"). We popped down to Battersea Bridge to see what all the fuss was about. We got there just after they caught the whale, and then stood around for an hour or so with thousands of others while not much happened. Once the tide came back in the authorities tried really hard to rescue and release the poor whale, to the chagrin of hundreds of Japanese gourmands, and others with the delusion that the rarer, bigger and more intelligent an animal is, the tastier. Unfortunately for the more romantic among us, the whale was too far gone and died before they could get it to the waiting safety/harpoons (delete as appropriate) of the open ocean.

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