The Thames from Blackfriars Bridge

I have an ongoing fascination with the Thames. The strap to this blog was originally “Tales from the riverside”. And my  first proper blog entry was one such tale. A lot of it comes from working in Vauxhall for 3 years and getting to spend at least a few minutes by the river most days.

The Thames is the seam that separates – and joins – north and south London. Through its 15+ urban tributaries all of London flows into it. It’s the biggest single focal point of the city. It’s something with which we [Londoners] all have our own personal relationship, something that we all experience differently.

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking of ways of collating these experiences. A twitter search is an obvious way of doing this but, as is the way with twitter, there’s a lot of noise to the small amount of signal.

I love the simple elegance of what @riverthames and @towerbridge do, giving life to objects by translating data into twitterness. But that’s something different to this.

I also love the idea of someone taking on the mantle of an object and giving it a sassy personality, as @imlondonbridge does. But that isn’t what I’m about either and anyway, @riverthames has started to do that itself.

So my offering is humbler, more human and probably less sustainable in the long term. I’m cherry-picking tweets about the Thames and re-tweeting them as @thamesstories. There are no rules at the moment, other than they’ll be stories, rather than news or informational bits. I might include pictures. I’d like to take this somewhere else eventually, but for now I just want to see where this goes in this format, if it goes anywhere at all.

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?

There’s this bloke who I often see while lunching by the river.

Tall, slim, probably in his early 40s and bit haggard looking. Like an unpampered Jeremy Clarkson. While most of the regulars down there will squeeze into the last chink of autumn sunlight that manages to get past the buildings, eat a sandwich and text their mates, this bloke just sits there and gazes out over the river. That’s not so odd in itself – I do it occassionally too, albeit not with the distant stare that he does – no, what makes him stand out is that he sits there and gazes out with 2 cans of Stella (always 2) while chain smoking Bensons.

He’s not a street drinker, though; not like the ones in Spring Gardens (I so wish I had a picture of the two I saw passed out on the grass this summer, curled up symmetrically around 2 empty bottles of Bells. They looked so at peace as I was walking into work). No, this bloke’s definitely on his lunch break. Some of the suits will nod in acknowledgement as they walk past on the way back to the office. He’ll nod back.