Though we were now shivering, the whale – only metres away – was boiling alive in the kettle of itself.Ī group of us slept lightly in the dunes, arrayed like question marks and commas on the white sand. ‘That whale has the opposite problem to hypothermia,’ the wildlife officers explained. Out of the ocean, the blubber smothers it. While in the ocean its blubber fat insulates the whale and allows the animal to maintain a constant inner temperature. ‘Under its skin the whale is wrapped in a subcutaneous envelope of fat called blubber.’ Trying to imagine the properties of blubber I could only conjure those agar desserts sold in Asian supermarkets: opaque, calorie-rich and more rigid than their wobble suggests. Cetacean – from the ancient Greek k ē tos, made Latinate as cetus: an order of mammals that includes whales, dolphins and porpoises. They raised their eyebrows and nodded along. ‘Whales are mammals,’ they began, ‘as we are too.’ This surprised those who were accustomed to thinking of all marine animals as species of fish. Wildlife officers, who had been stand-offish with the gathering crowd, relaxed and taught some lessons on whale physiology. The local lifesavers distributed zip-up hoodies. At sunset armfuls of grease-blotted butchers’ paper, chips and battered hake were passed around. How they imagined the whale – predator, prey or distant relation – was anyone’s guess, but the dogs seemed keen to get a closer look. There were dogs on the beach held back by their owners, sweeping flat quarter-circles in the sand with their tails. Everyone was talking about it, on the buses and in the delis. What the whale inspired was wonderment, a dilation of the ordinary. That the whale had re-stranded, this time higher up the beach, did not portend well for its survival but so astonished were the crowd and such a marvel was the animal that immoderate hope proved difficult to quash. Efforts made to free it from a sandbar in the morning had been aided by the tide. People cheered every time the whale wrestled in the breakers.

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