Old familar

Something brilliant has happened over the last three months. I've managed to get over the terrible case of "reader's block" which I'd been suffering from since I got pregnant with my daughter nine years ago.

I didn't notice it happen at the time - I was busy trying to work out how I was going to earn a crust post baby (the company I was working for was a dotcom whose bubble had just burst and the business was dying all around me at about the same pace that my unborn child was growing and developing inside me). But at some point post-baby, once the post-natal depression fog had lifted, I realised that I had more or less stopped reading fiction. And it wasn't just because I was too tired or too busy. I just *didn't want to* read books any more. When I started back into full time work when my daughter was a toddler, and I was commuting every day between Brighton and London, I would choose the newspaper and the crossword every time over a good book.

I felt a little bit embarassed about this change in me. Mr H had spotted it and interrogated me about it - and I reacted defensively. I don't know why. It felt like a guilty secret. I tried to "keep up appearances" by reading a few of my staple authors - Iain Banks, Patrick Gale, Sebastian Faulks. But in general, my heart was not in it.

I've loved reading for as long as I can remember. I can remember sneaking into the tiny library in my primary school at playtime and lunchtime (a great way to avoid the bullies) and losing myself in books. I discovered The Magician's Nephew, The Secret Garden and best of all The Silver Sword in that tiny room sitting on a ridged, green nylon carpet that I can still feel under my fingers now. The latter was the first book that I read again and again and again and again.

When I was a teenager I took a genuine thrill in being able to start my own personal library. I loved my books (as any of my friends who have helped my lug them from flat to flat in cardboard boxes over the years can tell you). I copied my dad's habit of writing my name and the month that I'd bought the book in the front cover. I enjoyed the process of bending back the spine of a book as I read it - and folding over the pages to mark my place. Truly making a book mine.

When I received my first ever pay packet (from a week of shifts behind the bar at Horts' wine bar in Edgbaston in Birmingham) I headed straight to an anitquarian bookshop in Harborne and bought myself a first edition copy of the biography of Oscar Wilde that Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas published in the 1930s. It cost me the entire contents of that pay packet - £60. It was worth it. (I still have that book. Wonder what it's worth now?)

I used to spend whole days in bookshops. This was a habit that began when I was a teenager in Birmingham - Waterstones opened a GIANT five storey shop in the centre of town that I could have lived in. At uni in Cambridge it was Heffers. When I moved to London I had the whole of Charing Cross Road to wander through. I followed chains of books and authors like a bloodhound, starting with a literary obsession with Oscar Wilde as a sixth former, winding through the 19th century's literary rebels and visionaries then moving backwards and forwards in time: Baudelaire and Welsh both connected by an unending chain of previous reads. Without wishing to sound like a complete arsehole - reading made things make sense.

So it came as a bit of a shock to realise in my early 30s that all of a sudden I just wasn't at all bothered about books or reading or bookshops. Friends recommended authors and titles to me and I just thought: "Yeah, whatever. I can't be arsed."

I still don't know why this happened.

But, earlier this year I started reading with my daughter. She has just the same inexhaustible appetite for a good book as I had at her age. I read her The Silver Sword in the spring, and since then we've worked through several other classics - and discovered some new ones.( Current read is book no.2 in the Lion Boy trilogy. I thoroughly recommend it. Genuis writing and a fantastically modern and relevant style and theme.)

And about three months ago that enjoyment of reading with her spilled over into reading on my own. Well, I had three Patrick Gale (my favourite author of all time) novels to catch up on for starters.

And then all of a sudden, I was spending every spare moment I could reading again.

Today I started Wuthering Heights - which I haven't picked up since studying it for my A' Level 19 years ago.

Hello, hello . . . It's good to be back. As Oasis once sang.