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Oh, don’t misunderstand me when I say this – I know I’m nothing special. What I am, I’ve often thought, is a little garden shed, a rickety box of old, reclaimed planks lifted from the great houses of Dickens and Darwin, topped off with cracked and fallen slates from Herman Melville’s home. My latch doesn’t work, my window doesn’t open, and if it rains, everything inside me gets wet in less than half an hour. And, well – that’s okay, you know? That’s just how it is, and I mind it a lot less than I could. Because here’s the thing – learning and growing were never what kept me climbing up those creaky old stairs with the next heavy hardback clutched tight to my chest all that time ago. All that mattered were the quiet hours with my mother, sitting on the bed, listening to her gentle words as they came. It was only years later that I understood how the stories that she read had become a part of me, worked into my skin and my blood by the quality of her voice, and the uncomplicated love that illuminated and defined those times.