Trust me, I will get around to what I’m reading, but first let me explain to you that one of the main ways in which I have managed to confound expectations of me is by becoming the mother of three children. I was a bookish, only child, entirely content without siblings, and sometimes when my three beautiful and part-feral children have reduced me to a screaming harridan, my mother will smirk and rather unhelpfully say: ‘You can see why I only had one.’

So, why did I have three? Well, to read to them of course. When my eldest had gone through the picture book phase, I wasn’t ready to put away my own lovingly preserved 1970s copies of Where the Wild Things Are, The Tiger Who Came to Tea, The Stone Doll of Sister Brute and Obstreperous. Nor was I ready to take out of circulation some of the newer picture books I’d come to know and adore: That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, Amy and Louis and Where the Giant Sleeps.