MONTY: The dolphing-saving marathon

A new year, a new me. This is the clarion call of everyone throughout the nation as 2009 stretches before us, a chance to put the corpulent, wayward slacker of 2008 behind you, and emerge lean, mean and flinty-eyed into the new diving season. With a tear in our eye, we bid farewell to the glorious past decade or so, a time of glassy-eyed excess, of milk and honey, of sitting back ruddy-cheeked and happy in the armchair ride of a booming economy. Ahead stretch the barren plains of recession, and soon we’ll all be dressed in rags, living in caves, warming our hands on a crackling fire built in the shell of an old TV, and telling the grandchildren about Big Brother and other frightful abominations.

Time to prepare ourselves for a sleek, cost-efficient few years ahead, then. In my particular case, this means doing a marathon. Not any old marathon though, as I shall be supremely motivated. I shall also – rather unusually – be dressed as a large dolphin.

To explain, you may well have heard of the bottlenose dolphins in the Moray Firth. This unique population of 130 dolphins is one of the only resident pods of this particular species in the United Kingdom, and has been intensively studied and observed. Despite some development in the region around them, they have remained in the bay that has always been their home, tolerating the presence of man and bringing pleasure to tens of thousands of visitors to the region. Such is the delicate status of this population that in 2005, a small area of the Moray Firth was designated a Special Area of Conservation (SAC), one of only two in Britain. This was – in effect – a contract between us and these animals, a rare moment of vision and sanity from a government that seems otherwise oblivious to the catastrophic impact that relentless development can have on our shallow coastal waters.

That was until last year, when the government decided that it might be worth allowing the development of an oil or gas terminal in the region where the dolphins live. Of course, this would have a devastating impact on the pod, and clearly goes against every rule covering the SAC. The contract, it seems, is somewhat one-sided.

The good people of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) are fighting tooth and nail against this, running a campaign that demands intense working hours, relentless lobbying of parliament, and generally fighting the battles that the dolphins can’t. All of this takes manpower, resources and, sadly, money.

And here we arrive at a man waddling round the London Marathon dressed in a dolphin suit. I did think of doing it without the costume, but I am aware of the tragically competitive buffoon that still lurks within me. I’d end up trying to keep pace with a skeletal Kenyan, and would almost certainly ‘do a Paula’, expiring messily in noxious puddles of my own waste products after a mile and a half. So, the dolphin suit it is. I did ask if I could do it carrying a real dolphin, but the WDCS were quite dismissive of this suggestion – there’s some sort of legislation that doesn’t allow live cetaceans to be carried through London for some reason (bloody red tape!).

One of my lingering memories of my time on the west coast of Scotland was taking my friends to see the dolphins just around the corner from the croft. A dolphin racing to meet your boat, and leaping clear of the water at the bow, is one of the great expressions of freedom in the animal kingdom. It’s the only thing I know of that makes anyone – regardless of race, creed, colour, sex or age – immediately laugh out loud when they see it. They gave me such great pleasure in my time up there, and I feel we in turn have a moral obligation to look out for them.

The very opposite of the poise and grace of a dolphin in flight is a wheezing chap in a comedy suit trundling slowly around a marathon, but inside all that latex and padding, amid all the gurning and swearing, will be – I hope – a determination to raise some money to keep the campaign alive as long as possible. For this runner at least, the marathon will have a real sense of porpoise.

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