Air
When you choose the titles of books as headings and then feel like you have to make up for it in the subheading...
You know which words I didn’t need to hear this week? Bomb cyclone. Also I’d be happy to never hear the words big beautiful and bill next to each other ever again. Other words I didn’t need to hear were the ones said to me from the results of a rapid antigen test that would have shouted YOU HAVE COVID, if RATs could talk rather than convey messages through dark red lines.
Suffice to say I have spent a week complaining about feeling terrible in between bouts of being too exhausted to sleep. The one thing all this time enabled me to do was watch, what will probably be the least viewed YouTube video of all time, a two and a half hour recording of my 40 year school reunion on Zoom. Are you still awake?
34 squares of people I barely recognised speaking about their lives since 1895 convinced me that the idea of high school years being the defining part of our lives is absolute hogwash. It is hard, when stuck at school, not to believe that how you fit in and how you feel for those years will dictate the rest of your life. The culture we live in pushes that belief - that the years we grow up in define the rest of our lives.
But it’s not true.
The teen years are tough, they also coincide with the high school years. But the hell that can be high school does not have to extend into your life. It’s hard to imagine a place after school where there will be so many cliques, so many places to be excluded or to laud your inclusion over others. It’s hard to imagine another time where your knowledge will be scored and compared to others in such a public way, where you will have to wear the same clothes as everyone else regardless of how you feel, look or define yourself. It’s hard to believe there will be another time in your life where you have so little control over who you are placed next to and how you interact with them.
I have not a single good memory of school and when I try to think of the people I went to school with, they kind of roll out of my head like an amorphous blob of nasty teens. When I view them 40 years later (from the safety of a screen in a country thousands of kilometres away) they seem like ordinary people, possibly a lot more conservative than I once imagined, but not one of them would keep me awake at night. I can’t imagine that it’s just me that’s changed I think we all have. I wish I would have believed somebody if they had told me that then.
Strong recommendation to go to your high school reunion. On your own. In your own time. Virtually. And in bed.
I have tried (again) to keep clear of stories about Donald Trump building concentration camps, destroying the economy and of the course the ongoing suffering and horror in Gaza but I do want to share some important words that resonated with me around two of most heinous sexual abuse cases that made news this week.
Louise Milligan on the case of the childcare abuse in Victoria
While there is discussion about alleged sexual offending in #childcare settings, not referring to that matter directly in any way, but please be aware that when you give public support to high-profile men accused of sexual offences without knowing a single thing about what took place, when you undermine complainants, you give succour to all of the creeps who seek to abuse children and women. You and your chorus of friends who say it is “not the man I know” (of course it isn’t, he’d hardly advertise it) say to any prospective offender out there that he might well get away with it. You say to any silent victim out there, “you will not be believed”. You tell the child that lives inside them that they are right to be silent. You hurt them. You impede possible pathways to justice. You help to keep the cycle of criminality going. Think before you comment on something you know nothing about. Think about how hurtful it may well be to someone who is suffering.
And Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez from The Cut on the Sean Combes trial
“All I can think about right now is Cassie on the stand, days away from giving birth to her third child, torturously recounting how, for years, the man she loved inflicted a level of physical, emotional, and sexual violence that is nearly impossible to fathom,” writes Andrea González-Ramírez. “Seven years ago, it seemed as if we were moving toward building a world in which she’d be believed. That we are not is almost too painful to accept.”
We know the courtroom has rarely been the place where survivors can find justice, but, for a brief moment in time, it seemed as if we could move past the constraints of the criminal legal system, rewiring our collective understanding of how abusers wield their power over their victims and reaffirming survivors’ humanity. But the reaction to Diddy’s verdict tells a different story: Hating women out loud is really, truly back.
Every time I hear a story of sexual abuse I can’t not think of the thousands of people affected by abuse who have to listen to the excuses we make for their aggressors… Thank you to the people who call it out
READING
Onto a bit of light reading that wasn’t so light…
I’m not too embarrassed to admit that I went into this book scared, scarred even from reading the three previous titles in this series by John Boyne. I absolutely love Boyne as a writer but the last one I read in this series (Fire) haunted me. It was very graphic.
Air was a pleasure to read, although I was constantly nervous of turning the page because I have been lost in Boyne’s words before only to be jolted out by a very harrowing detail. I also spent a lot of time going back to the other books in the series to jolt my memory of where these characters have appeared in the past. I think while it is said that all of the books (Earth, Fire, Water and Air) stand alone, this one in particular is elevated by knowing the back story. Although of course it can be read alone.
The story takes place mostly on an airplane but it is a reflection on a history lived on land. Aaron and his son Emmet are traveling to Ireland, although the reason and the detail of this trip only comes towards the middle/end of this short book. 30,000 feet above ground Aaron debates discussing his own childhood trauma with his son. It’s a story about a father and son, about connection and the past and about moving forward. It is not as graphic and confronting as the others and I think maybe it tries too hard to tie a bow around the whole series but I wouldn’t miss reading it.
Thanks for reading to the end. Again
May I recommend a diet of biscuits and tea for anyone else suffering Covid at the moment? Or anyone who just loves tea and biscuits?
If you know someone who you think would like to read my book recommendations and other general jabbering, please tell them to join us.
Lana
Not sure if the statement about leaving school in 1895 was intentional or a typo, Lana, but it made me laugh regardless x