Bedtime just isn't the same without books
HOW heartbreaking to learn that parents are so pushed for time they’ve trimmed the bedtime story from their daily repertoire.
Reading to one’s over-stimulated thoroughly over-excited offspring as they fidgeted beneath the duvet was the ideal way to calm and soothe them while slyly upping their educational ante by reading them improving books they’d never have dreamed of attempting on their own.
I managed to inflict ‘Swallows and Amazons’ ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ and even chunks of Milton on my two without them noticing. When time was tight, I’d dig out an anthology and intone bits of Belloc or even the odd Shakespeare sonnet.
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Occasionally the sound of my own sonorous voice would send me into a deep sleep from which I’d awake with a jolt to find the girls whooping it up with wanton abandon. What can possibly be pressing enough to merit excising this essential literary ritual from parental routine?