Beanie & Biggles famously claimed dibs on a dead cow on the beach, while Poppy got herself a pair of bunny pants, but Monkey & Daisy have just landed the winning card in the game of doggy Top Trumps by scoring a whole whale.
Local papers had noted that a dead whale had washed up on the beach the previous day, but they’d also indicated that the coastguard was on the verge of removing it, so I expected it to be gone when we arrived for our run. Daisy immediately knew better, smelling something novel and exciting while we were still in the car park, but my nose remained blissfully unaware of the whale until we were less than a couple of hundred yards from it. By that time, the arm I was using to hold onto the leads had already been stretched about an inch longer than it’s counterpart.
I made a point of keeping a good distance from the carcass; its tongue was hugely swollen and apparently Police had been warning walkers not to get too close for fear that the whale’s guts could explode. If only the council had thought to erect”Beware: exploding whale” signs on the beach; that would have been very Pythonesque. They had however turned off the electronic sign involving visitors of the water quality, but if it had been on I guess it would have read “Absolutely minging”. We didn’t go into the water, and we didn’t approach the whale, but the beach’s resident tractor did both, tentatively trying to nudge the body further into the sea while avoiding getting trapped in the wet sand. Monkey became very interested in the tractor but Daisy’s attention never wavered from the whale and the jog back to the van was punctuated with lots of “throwing out the anchor” manoeuvres. In the end I actually had to pick Daisy up and carry her part of the way, otherwise we’d have spent the whole day at the beach.
