Why reading is one of the greatest skills a child can learn.

Learning to read is like learning to walk, talk, ride a bike, or swim. It gives you an irrevocable sense of freedom.

Like most children – at least, those born in ‘my era’ – I didn’t learn the alphabet until I started primary school, so I probably couldn’t read much before I was six. But like any wonderful skill you learn that you never forget: walking, talking, riding a bike, swimming; once learned, it gave me an irrevocable sense of freedom and excitement, and I never looked back.

I devoured anything by Enid Blyton and Beatrix Potter before moving on to works by J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll and Emily Bronte. Then there were the authors I discovered at secondary school: Shakespeare, Huxley, and many more.

Most nights, I would read under the candlewick with a torch until I invariably got into trouble with my parents. Little wonder I was always so hard to raise from bed the next day. We lived in the countryside, so school holidays could be a lonely affair. I wrote stories for entertainment in between playing in the fields with the Jersey cows, and building cubby houses out of hay bales.