On April the 11th, 2020, as the world went into lockdown, I started reading to my mother. Gilly was in her early 80s and living on her own, still in the house I grew up in from the age of nine. 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. And I did.
I read poems (one or two of mine) but mostly much better than that, for about 250 days. On 8th September 2020, I decided to read The Piper at the Gates of Dawn from Wind in the Willows, my favourite chapter (well apart from Chapter One maybe, and possibly the visit to Badger in the Wild Wood!). My mother 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.” Well, only five and a half years later here we are.
On Christmas Day 2020, I read a wonderful passage from War and Peace, the one where the Rostov children get dressed up as mummers and Sonya kisses Nikolai. On Boxing Day I went back to my edition and saw that there are 360 chapters in War and Peace, and thought, well, that sounds like a plan! And so we began on some big novels, with some gorgeous poems for a few days, sometimes creating a glorious space between the months needed to read the novels. Six years on, I haven’t stopped. 2,192 consecutive readings and counting.
Every night, Gilly listens in bed and responds with a line or a thought that has struck her from the day’s reading, and then sends me 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, the odd tractor going by if I am recording in the garden in Wales, and my grip of accents is, shall we say, patchy and a little inconsistent. But I do try, and do whatever I do with energy. They are offered here exactly in the form they were originally recorded, at their original lengths.
These aren’t done in a studio. Indeed I have done them in hotel rooms, on rooftops, and once in an empty railway carriage. Life is still happening all around. I think that’s part of the beauty of all this really.
If you hear a reading where the quality really does make the thing unlistenable, do just let me know (nicely please!) and I will re-record and slot it in. But I think for the most part, my mother alerted me as we went along whenever there had been a technical glitch.
