What everyone is talking about this week: The great porpoise panic

Last month threw up a number of stories about dolphins and porpoises. At the start of the month, a motorboat was blamed for injuring a pod of the former off the coast of Cornwall, with footage on social media showing their dorsal fins sliced open or cut off. Two weeks later, a dolphin nicknamed Reggie allegedly tried to drown several people off the Dorset coast, with observers noticing that the lone male had a penchant for women in wetsuits.

Reggie was also spotted mocking a group near Lyme Regis, coming up from behind and miming them treading water. As his legend grew, so did the number of admirers: paddle-boarders seeking him out at sunset were criticised for ‘surrounding’ the wild animal.

Dolphins are funny old creatures: playful, agile and fiercely intelligent. Although fiction has always been kind to them, they have a tendency to snap and find a close relative in the ocean’s apex predator, the orca.

The Marine Management Organisation recently issued a statement urging swimmers to stay away from dolphins and ignore them if they cross their paths. If this feels like overreach, there may be reason to believe the beasts are angry with us.

Over in the Strait of Gibraltar, orca have been attacking yachts since 2020, with one theory claiming that they are exacting revenge after a vessel injured a member of the pod.

Reggie, like his Cornish cousins, has been the victim of a collision, incurring a noticeable gash to his body in July. His borderline aggression vis-à-vis certain swimmers could feasibly be some kind of retaliation.

These incidents have prompted avid discussion. Should there be stricter laws around what boats the average licence-holder can drive or more severe penalties for damage to wildlife? The footage of the Cornish pod was tragic, almost as if they’d been harpooned. Part of the upset, however, came down to responsibility: the danger posed by a propeller or driving a boat at high speed.

Dolphins cannot help but be curious about men at sea. On a fishing trip to St Mawes two summers ago, at least 20 of them followed our boat for close to an hour. They would leap into the air, nearly scraping the hull as we bounced up and down on the waves. Should we have stopped the engine and waited for them to swim away? Perhaps, although that would have been unnatural. To witness dolphins surfing the waves alongside a vessel is among the great moments of interspecies communion. It would be wrong to try and tame them, but should we really push them away when they come up to say hello?

The best defence against the rise of AI

In the lee of our very online times, designers are winding back the clock. The pull of hand-drawn furniture, that feels rough-and-ready, has seemingly never been stronger. Self-taught ceramicist Sophia Pelizzoli has produced plates, bowls and trays, with hand-painted fish, fruit and vegetables, and furniture designer Bloomsbury Revisited is doing something similar. Taking a leaf out of the Charleston House playbook, its new collection draws on the language of the English countryside, decorating lampshades with images of greyhounds and jockeys. Charleston, the East Sussex farmstead where the Bloomsbury Group met, sets something of a blueprint for the whimsical style espoused by designers today. Among the brightest stars of this new movement is the decorative artist Meg Boscawen, whose hand-painted walls, wardrobes and cabinets are a favourite among the fashion cognoscenti. Perhaps the best defence against the rise of AI is the human hand.