From Independent.co.uk:
The 18ft northern bottlenosed whale should have been out in the Atlantic diving for squid. Instead, it had somehow wandered up river into the city late on Thursday, far from its mother who had been heard calling 40 miles away, off the coast of Essex. Londoners lined the river to see it, but the plight of the whale captured imaginations all round the world, not least because its story had all the elements of a modern fairytale: the child lost and lonely in an alien and dangerous place; the desperate parent calling out, and the rescuers, who waded into the water and comforted the whale with their bare hands yesterday, before helping with its bid for freedom.