Whale solidarity
Sometimes a certain story just manages to capture the public imagination. This weekend, London has been lucky enough to benefit from such a story – the Thames Whale. See the coverage from The Observer here, The Sun here, and then it even reached Dagens Nyheter and Spiegel. Saturday was a pleasant, sunny, almost spring-like day in London and Helena and I had decided to take a trip to Greenwich just to wander around really. But there were tens of people staring excitedly at the river – the whale was coming! OK, it was on the barge by this point, but the feel-good among the people beside the river was fantastic. We spoke to a pleasant lady from New Zealand who explained what they did to help beached whales in her home country, and a photographer excitedly told us this was the second time she had seen the whale. It was quite a wonderful, very sociable occassion. All I can hope is that the British population think of this in the future, and maybe make a donation to Greenpeace’s Save the Oceans campaign as a result!
For the pictures from Greenwich:
🙂 fair enough!
We need a whale somewhere in the EU institutions?
All we have at the moment is Elmar Brok.
Jon, even my mum mentioned to me how amazing was the story of the whale… this animal put London in the centre of the world once again, something that not even Blair manages very often 🙂
Talking about whales…When I was a child there was a whale in the Zoo of Barcelona, she was called Ulises, and like in the book she enjoyed long travels in her life. Ulises was, together with the albino gorilla (Copito de nieve or Snowflake in English), the biggest attraction of the zoo. For all Catalan kids the visit to the zoo to see Copito and Ulises was one of our first social activities .
However Ulises had to face 2 big problems: the weather was too hot and the swimming pool became too small, after couple of years. After many investigations and analysis, the only possible way for Ulises to survive was moving her to another zoo. It was an amazing logistical exercise for the zoo, firemen and police. The whole city was paralyzed in front of the TV seeing how Ulises was put in a even smaller swimming pool that will bring her by plane to the United States. She arrived safely after almost 20 hours of plane and there was even a follow-up of the first days of adaptation of Ulises to her new home and colleagues.
That was something that really brought together all the inhabitants of a big city… like in London, everyone had something in common in that particular moment: saving Ulises or saving the Thames whale was a common goal. When will be Europe a common goal?