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To Read to Sleep

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I’ve always read in bed. Always. For as long as I can remember, really—since before the age when memories begin to settle into things you could recount. It’s never felt like a habit. More like an instinct. A deeply ingrained, highly enjoyable ritual, as natural as brushing your teeth, only infinitely more rewarding. In the little back bedroom of my parents’ house—next to their shops in the Soviet Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire—my first lamp stood on a marble-topped wash-hand stand. The only other furniture was my bed and a chest of drawers that looked like it had given up trying. The lamp itself was a silver lady, balancing on one leg, arm raised to the heavens, in the manner of the Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy, only this one had a perforated purple lampshade and an air of resignation. It was by her light that I discovered my first loves: Enid Blyton, the Fife-Finder Outers, the Seven Seeker Uppers, and Alfred Hitchcock Investigates—anything in a series. I was mad for a serie...
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