Went to Tuesday night’s talk on ‘The Whale’ (known to its keepers, even conversationally, as the above*) which swam up the Thames last January. Richard Sabin, curator of mammals at the Natural History Museum, was in conversation with The Guardian’s Ian Katz. There was something bordering on macabre about sitting next to the glass encased skeleton of the Northern Bottlenose while watching the short film of its Thames adventure and ultimately futile rescue attempt by Richard and his team.

It turns out that while the attentions of the public and the media virtually demanded an extreme rescue plan (ranging from picking it up and transporting its hanging, swinging frame by military helicopter to the west coast - which is, after all, where it should have been in the first place, if not rather in the Atlantic proper to the west of Ireland - to the more circumspect and certainly less scary from a whale-perspective attempt to lift it on to a barge (on which it finally died) and ferry it back down the Thames), Richard was pretty sure it was a doomed project from the start, seeing as no large mammal making it upstream of the Thames Barrier had ever survived before.

The skeleton itself was beautiful too, like that of a legless dinosaur (heh).

Richard was an all-round good guy who was genuinely amazed at the interest the whale generated, both at the time as well as to the extent that 20 or so people would turn up on a parky Tuesday night to hear him talk about it.

You can understand his surprise - dealing as he does with this sort of incident all the time - but it was one of those events that Caught The Public’s Imagination: big fish is first spotted by a train passenger crossing Waterloo Bridge and it’s not long before TV crews in helicopters are on the case (along with Richard’s people), leading to a Friday afternoon of real-life circus, replete with spontaneous riverside applause (well, how else do you react to a whale in a river?).

By Saturday morning it’s families by the carload. The whale still gets applause each time it surfaces, but people can tell that things are going a bit wrong. She’s beginning to look more anxious, bashing into boats (from the whale’s skeleton it’s clear she’s broken the end of her nose in her distressed thrashing). Her skin is beginning to come away due to prolonged exposure to fresh water. This isn’t the celebration it was supposed to be. The kids know it’s not right. By the time 2006/40 has been loaded aboard the tug and is being doused with buckets of water, the atmosphere is more funereal. Sometime after the whale re-passes the Thames Barrier, Peter and his team agree that the obvious distress and suffering are too much and decide to euthanise her. The whale dies shortly before they can. The floodlights on the boat are cut, the tug docks at the riverside and Peter and his team spend a few private minutes alone with the whale.

* There are apparently over 800 cetacean-involving incidents every year. This was the 40th of 2006. You couldn’t give them all names, could you?