h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So dead badgers aside, what else has been happening? Well the weekend was a little bit of an odd one, but on the whole pretty good. On Friday night my girlfriend and I had a quiet night in with some nice food, a bottle of wine and a DVD.

On Saturday we had a lazy breakfast and wondered into town. We dawdled through the Bath Cheese Festival sampling their wares for a while (I can heartily recommend sheep’s cheese). And in the afternoon my girlfriend borrowed a bike from one of our friends from work and we went for a cycle ride along the river and canal towards Bradford on Avon.

In the evening we had another nice meal and watched another movie called Red Dust which was part of the BBC’s Africa Lives season. It’s about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa after the collapse of the Apartheid regime. Apparently the philosophy of this commission was not to bring justice to perpetrators or apportion blame, but simply to get them to admit the truth. “The mandate of the commission was to bear witness to, record and in some cases grant amnesty to the perpetrators of crimes relating to human rights violations, reparation and rehabilitation.”

Thus, in the film, a police officer who tortured two black prisoners is applying for amnesty from prosecution. If the commission believes that his crimes were politically motivated and also that he is disclosing the complete truth then he will not be charged for them. The film follows the inquiry into the torture of the two black prisoners, one of whom is now a powerful MP in the ANC and the other simply disappeared while supposedly in police custody. It was a very moving film and I already want to watch it again.

The oddest part of the weekend came on Sunday. During last week I got an email from my ex-girlfriend saying that she would be leaving Bath soon and suggesting that we could meet up just to clear the air before she left for good. I agreed and we arranged to meet for coffee on Sunday. I don’t like to discuss my personal life too much in this journal, but it’s enough to say that after spending an hour or so talking to her, I feel a lot better about everything.

To end on a good note, on Sunday evening my girlfriend and I spent a couple of hours on the internet looking for hostels in Switzerland. I don’t think I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m going to a conference in Geneva next week and once all the boring chemistry talks are over my girlfriend is flying out to join me and we’re going to spend the weekend touring round Lake Geneva. It’s not much of a holiday, but it’s probably the best we’re going to manage this summer.