{"id":9677,"date":"2011-06-05T11:43:15","date_gmt":"2011-06-05T15:43:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=9677"},"modified":"2011-06-05T11:44:01","modified_gmt":"2011-06-05T15:44:01","slug":"brendan-oneill-goes-whale-watching","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/06\/05\/brendan-oneill-goes-whale-watching\/","title":{"rendered":"Brendan O’Neill goes whale watching"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u2009It\u2019s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic breeze, talking gaily about going to \u2018meet the whales\u2019. I\u2019m sure one of them had even used the word \u2018commune\u2019, as a verb, it being fashionable now to believe that humans can make a spiritual, spine-tingling connection with whales and dolphins.<\/p>\n

Yet little did this excitable unit know that within the hour they\u2019d be clinging to any bit of the boat\u2019s infrastructure they could find, as we got tossed around by a pissed-off Poseidon, minke whales mocking us with their mighty tails for daring to enter into their cruel and alien world.<\/p>\n

Admittedly it was our own fault. The woman at the whale-watching office at the harbour had warned us that the weather was unpredictable. \u2018We might not go out today,\u2019 she said, in that wonderfully weird accent that Icelandic people speak English in: part-Viking, part-Scouse. \u2018It\u2019s looking a bit patchy,\u2019 she explained.<\/p>\n

Now, in a country famous for its angry climate, for its spewing geysers, for having the word \u2018Ice\u2019 in its name, where tourists can buy T-shirts that say \u2018Lost in Iceland\u2019 on the front and \u2018Is anybody out there?\u2019 on the back, and where they have actually made a horror film called Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre, you might think that we would have taken more seriously this native harbour woman\u2019s warning of \u2018patchiness\u2019 at sea. But no. So determined were we to see the whales that, in a mish-mash of European accents, we all said: \u2018Let\u2019s go! We don\u2019t mind if it\u2019s a little rough.\u2019 They would make for brilliant famous last words.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where our hero gets a thrilling ride he didn’t expect, but finally gets a bit of revenge: \u2009It\u2019s the hippyish family of three from Norfolk that I feel sorry for. There they were at the Old Harbour in Reykjavik, their multicoloured fleeces zipped up to the chin to protect them from a light but Arctic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,62,73],"tags":[247,541,202],"class_list":["post-9677","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-europe","category-randomness","tag-arctic","tag-iceland","tag-travel"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2w5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9677"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9677\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9679,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9677\/revisions\/9679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}