Dead Whale in Burnley
by David Gaffney
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Funnily enough, I met my wife when we were both walking through a dead whale in Burnley. I mean, we didn’t start seeing each other till much later in life, we were only about thirteen then, but that was when I first met her. She went in through the tail and out through the mouth and I went the opposite way. Says a lot about me really.
The whale had been scooped out and preserved, and its insides all hung with coloured lanterns. There were other sea life exhibits inside it too, in glass cases. I seem to remember there were harpoons and whaling tools displayed next to it on the truck. The smell was awful - a mixture of rotting flesh and formaldehyde. I put my hand on the part of the whale's mouth it uses to strain plankton out of seawater and it felt rough like the inside of an old sofa.
I did speak to her then, yes. I asked her what she thought about being inside a whale. She said she was disappointed because it wasn't blue. And she also thought it looked a bit shabby, like it had been around a lot of different towns and had a lot of people walking through its belly. She said she was troubled by its sad, beady eyes.
I thought - here is a young girl with high expectations and good standards.
Unusual for Burnley.
It's true, striding through the corpse of a whale on the back of a lorry is a bit different to a day out to Muncaster castle or a rowing boat on Derwent water. But then again there was never much to do in Burnley. Still isn’t as far as I can tell.
We met again later at the Slypt Disc in Workington and got married when we were 19 and haven’t looked back since. Yes, we didn’t think we'd be standing next to a dead whale again at our age.
I don’t know. It must mean something mustn't it?
He was a finback, we were told by the circus feller, and his name was Eric. He is buried under a rollercoaster in Morecambe.
