by I got back on Sunday afternoon. I was in no rush. I made a few stops, to take pictures of the view (while still up high) or to pick blackberries, or when down a bit lower, to wander around towns that were practically dead at midday on a Sunday. In Gurahonț, a small town of 5000 or so, the only sign of life emanated from the church in a minor key. It became much hotter all of a sudden, the AB and BH number plates turned into ARs and finally TMs (like mine), and then I was home. The heat. That’s the main reason why I got away. I’m very glad I did. It was beautiful up there. So quiet and unspoilt. And I got to speak a fair bit of Romanian – that’s become an increasing rarity. The great news is that I still feel normal now, despite the heat. It’s 37 degrees as I write this.
Yesterday morning I had a lesson with the seven-year-old boy in Dumbrăvița, then it was off to the pet hotel to pick up Kitty. She’s slept most of the time since I collected her. In the afternoon I met up with Dorothy at Berăria 700. We both had an ice coffee. She gave me a bag of vegetables from the village, while I gave her an apple and blackberry crumble. We ended up talking about the Jason Arday scandal, which has somehow travelled around the world, and then got on to the thorny topic of religion. For me it isn’t thorny at all, by the way. I don’t believe in any god, nor in the afterlife. I did allude to this when I maintained that the same thing that happened to her kitten last year, and will happen to Kitty hopefully many years in the future, will happen to her and to me. The idea that us humans are afforded special treatment is utterly preposterous to me. I think Dorothy was shocked. (I remember when my Sunday school teacher – well the classes were actually on Wednesday evenings – told us that we may go to heaven but our cats and dogs never do, and even at the age of seven I realised that was total baloney.) Probably because we’d got on to such a contentious topic, we accidentally forgot to pay. I didn’t even notice until Dorothy messaged me. I went back there this morning to pay and apologise.
I’d never even heard of Jason Arday until a few days ago, probably because I don’t live in the UK. The whole saga reminds me of Lance Armstrong. He’d survived cancer and raised millions for charity through his foundation, so he was obviously a good guy, right? His exploits – seven Tour de France wins – were beyond question. Until they weren’t. Something similar has happened with Arday. All that adversity. He was supposedly autistic, and even non-verbal until eleven, so you couldn’t really question him. And of course he’s black. What made him fabricate so much I don’t really get. The ultra-marathons, the football, his appearances on 7 Up which were clearly impossible given that he was born in 1985. Why do that? As well as depriving someone else of the place they deserved, he (and those who hired him and turned a blind eye) have done racial minorities a huge disservice. From now on, any successful black academic who has reached their position on merit will get certain people screaming DEI, which is a horrible American term. (It was always called positive discrimination in the UK, but everything now has to be Americanised with three snappy initials. I still can’t stand the term ATM for a cash machine.)
I wanted to include dozens of pictures, but it’s only letting me upload these two, from the day I arrived:
