Cetacea on Westgarth

And then a woman on her bike, her small boy on his own and quite close to her right flank, and three pebbles dropped into my clear happy brain as I crossed the road with my dog ahead: 'whale and calf'. It took me some time to understand the association that threw those 'Woolfian' discs through my brain. At first I was a little mortified at my linking a woman with 'whale' (as big as a whale?), and with 'calf' (what a cow!), despite their correctness in zoological nomenclature, but then it occurred to me: the shape a body makes on a bike as seen from some hovering eye, the position and proximity of the boy to his mother, and also, more enigmatically, their motion: a slow glide through air (water) and wind resistance (current).