On April the 11th, 2020, as the world went into lockdown, I started reading to my mother. Gilly was in her early 80s, alone — my father had died some years before — and I wanted to reach out every day without necessarily putting the pressure of a phone call on. So I read her a poem, into my iPhone, and sent it on WhatsApp. She could listen whenever she chose. The first poem was Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market, because of how much she’d always loved it. She responded by saying what a loving and lovely idea it was. And I thought, well, we’ll do that again tomorrow.
One thing led to another. Poems became chapters. On 8th September 2020, I recorded The Piper at the Gates of Dawn from Wind in the Willows — the chapter that changed everything. Gilly loved it, and when I asked if she’d like the whole book, she said yes. During the reading she told me: “You should do a Wind in the Willows podcast or a series of same.” She saw where this was going before I did.
On Christmas Day 2020, I read the Rostov children getting dressed as mummers in War and Peace. On Boxing Day I noticed: 360 chapters. A chapter a day — that’s roughly a year. And so we began. Six years on, I haven’t stopped. Over 2,192 days of reading. Dickens, Eliot, Collins, Thackeray, and more. Every night, Gilly listens in bed and responds — and sends a blessing for sleep. Sleep Welshly. Sleep Christmasly. Sleep restoredly. Sleep a cottage sleep. She has invented her own beautiful language of goodnight.
These aren’t audiobooks. I’m strictly an amateur. You’ll hear mistakes, stumbles, children in the background. Life is still happening. That’s the whole point.