A whale of a tragedy on the beach

ON the morning last week when a whale came up the bay, I found four missed calls on my telephone at 10am.

I thought for a minute that it was Murphy’s Law again, the whole world would have seen the whale but not your wildlife correspondent.

However, happily — or rather, unhappily — this was not the case. The whale was going nowhere and, even as I write this an hour after seeing it, seems set to be available for viewing for some time, a tragic spectacle, for how can the tides shift this creature as big as a barn and weighing as much as 18 Land Rovers?