It is La Niña, I’m told, that is responsible for our cold, wet spring, after a warm, wet winter. A good time to settle in with reading and writing, I suppose, although I find it increasingly difficult to do more than listen to audiobooks while I potter around the kitchen or carry them around the house in my phone.
Most recently I listened to I Who Have Never Known Men, 
a post-apocalyptic Belgian novel by Jacqueline Harpman, whose new translation, I gather, has been giving it new life. It was thoughtful, and, like so much speculative fiction, unsettlingly prescient in its depiction, in this case, of unexplained imprisonment. I did appreciate its turning some male views of forced communities – think Lord of the Flies – on their heads. The women in this novel manage to get along and get things done and built. Reading her bio, I see that Harpman was trained as a psychoanalyst, which perhaps explains much about the carefully constructed relationships between the women.
Before that, I was in an entirely different world. A couple of years ago, a friend from 
my boarding school childhood sent along some comments responding to a review in the Guardian of Charles Spencer’s memoir, A Very Private School. This led me down some rabbit holes, not least of which were a couple of fascinating nonfiction books about boarding school syndrome; Joy Schaverien had coined the term and written about it in a book of that name, as had another therapist, Nick Duffell, in his book The Making of Them.
Though Spencer’s school’s structure and terminology were very close matches to mine, my experiences were, mercifully, without the physical and sexual brutality of Spencer’s schooldays. Girls’ schools are (were, in the time period Spencer and I share, the seventies) kinder places, at least physically. And perhaps that makes them harder to write about, so there are far fewer books on the topic. Much of what I’ve seen is of the Enid Blyton variety; who knows, perhaps even back then there were a lot of girls who enjoyed the experience.
At a dinner with half a dozen of my former classmates from boarding school days a couple of summers ago, it did seem that most had more or less favourable memories. It may have helped that they had graduated from the school, which means they reached the age when they were able to exercise some control over their lives there than I had when I left after grade 10; and they also graduated under the eye of a different head of school than was running things in my day.
And the actual physical book I’ve been enjoying is Kindest Regards : New and Selected Poems by Ted Kooser. I had heard his name and seen the odd poem but hadn’t
sat down with a full collection before. Alas for my shelf space and budget, I was compelled to return the library copy and buy my own as it’s something I expect to dip into for some time to come. Readable and rich in its language – a tough trick to pull off.
And something I had been reflecting on after seeing an old interview with Scottish poet Norman MacCaig, who believed strongly in poetry as a communication. Said that when this had become clear to him, had gone through and edited the obfuscations out of his old work in the interests of clarity.
