Cheese please

S returned from his 3-day Catalan immersion jaunt carrying a load of goat's cheese given to him by a shepherd in exchange for a book. He has met the goats concerned (lovely black ones), and these are all recently made cheeses using different methods. He had a lovely if exhausting time, culminating in last night's barbecue feast accompanied by hearty singing of Pyrenean songs along with five accordionists and a violinist.

There's no way we can eat all this in a reasonable time, so I took some along to my book group as a gift this evening. We talked about Alice Munro's Dear Life -- but actually spent at least as much time talking about her family, after the awful revelation by her daughter Andrea about being abused by her stepfather, Munro's second husband. It's amazing how being a national treasure made it possible for it to be covered up even after Andrea's abuser had pleaded guilty and been given a suspended sentence (30 years after the fact). 

We decided the real villain (apart from the perpetrator himself) was Andrea's father Jim Munro, who not only didn't tell Alice when his 9-year old daughter revealed what had happened, instructing his other children not to tell her either, but continued to send her to stay with her mother and partner during summer holidays.

It was strange rereading Dear Life (Munro's last book) knowing this, as several stories are about older men exploiting or controlling naive young women, and you can't help seeing them differently. Then there's the famous last line of the title story: "We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do -- we do it all the time."

And with that, I'm off to bed!