RAY OF LIGHT

When mother-of-two Nicola Bulley vanished while walking her springer spaniel along a quiet stretch of the River Wyre, the police search was hampered by crowds of amateur sleuths, psychics and social-media live-streamers, drawn to rural Lancashire amid a shameful frenzy of online speculation. On Tiktok alone, videos with the hashtag of her name garnered some 270 million views.

It would be three long weeks before Nicola’s body was discovered in the river, less than a mile from where she was first reported missing. An inquest brought her family a scrap of solace: expert witnesses said she had succumbed to cold-water shock after accidentally falling in, and would have drowned in seconds.

After popping up in Hampshire, the Netherlands and Dieppe last year, wandering walrus Thor kicked off his 2023 European tour in Scarborough, drawing a crowd of hundreds as he took his ease on a cobbled slipway. Having cancelled their New Year fireworks to avoid scaring off the celebrity marine mammal, locals were left bereft when his 900kg of tusks and blubber splashed off into the dark before midnight, briefly re-emerging at a yacht club up the coast two days later. Three year-old Thor, classified rather disrespectfully as an ‘adolescent vagrant’ by marine biologists, is thought to have started life in the Canadian Arctic, heading south in a disoriented search for sea ice, his natural but vanishing habitat.

In February, to great international rejoicing, Thor was spotted snoozing on an Icelandic dockside. Wherever he lays his fat, that’s his home.

Left: Nicola Bulley with her partner Paul Ansell; an aerial photograph of the stretch of the River Wyre where she went missing on 27 January. Below: Thor the wandering walrus, who stopped off in Scarborough over the New Year