It can be the most trying of routine days. Leaking shoes, lunch made but left at home, traffic jams and interminable mid-afternoon meetings. Meetings which plunge you into an existential crisis or light sleep, meetings whose only consolation is doodling and writing down the foul made-up business-speak of senior managers. Then missed connections on the way home, absent supermarket ingredients, children who have forgotten how to sleep, rows with partners, and a packed-up boiler. Still, with every exhausting second, sanctuary ticks closer.
Lingering through daylight and evening’s trials is the promise of night-time’s rosy haven. You, your bed and a book: a heavenly retreat. This is double refuge – firstly, hidden from the world beneath bedcovers; secondly, entering another between book covers. Begin reading and you are transported, despite being bedridden in a day soon to close. You end it by saying goodbye and sinking into another universe. Of course, reading books should always be like this, but all is enriched in the thick quiet before midnight. The slumbering breaths of partners and children beside you are no distraction, nor rain tapping at the window or wind roaring. If anything, such comforting sounds enhance the charm of your bedtime stories. Here you are, the door is closed, the day is done, the pages are open and all the worlds you need have awoken.
Under the bedside lamp’s glow, you begin one page sitting up and the next lying down. There are sideways wriggles and sighs as you struggle to find the perfect contortion for reading, and the complaints of partners awoken by laughter and gasps, but these are all part of the performance and distraction of reading in bed. Not for one line are you thinking of leaking shoes or broken boilers, and you may well be successfully putting back a dreaded tomorrow morning. Time hurtles forward – midnight comes and you recalculate the hours of sleep required. Just one more paragraph, just one more chapter, you’re not ready yet for a return to reality, even if your eyelids are weighing heavier by the word. The book has become a voice whispering to you and you alone. Once more encountered is the childhood joy of reading beneath the sheets with a torch. Today is gone, tomorrow is on hold, and reading at bedtime has left you contentedly abandoned in a world all of your own.