August. It is possible that I am writing subconsciously, that the pages and chapters are mounting up in some deep, secret chamber in the back of my head, ready for me to transcribe in a few weeks’ time when…Nice thought, but it’s probably best to admit that I’m not working. August shimmers and dazzles even more than usual; the kids wake at dawn and want to go swimming as soon as they get up; something in the garden always needs picking or watering.

I’ve given up. Instead, I’m reading, novel after novel, soaking them up as if I were a sponge. I put one book down, pick up another. I read in the rare quiet moments of the day and after the kids have gone to sleep, or when they are reading too; I read in my favourite chair, on the deck, in the hammock, in the bathroom, in bed, on the beach, at the kitchen table. Yesterday, swimming back from the far side of the lake, I noticed a young woman, tanned and voluptuous, lying on her back on a turquoise airbed and reading, as it happened, a journal called Philosophy Today. Good idea - I’ll try an airbed next. The trick must be to get out and back without soaking the book… I’m reading. I’m more or less reading in my sleep. I’m reading so much that in order to make sense of myself, I’ve had to go back and re-read Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. No one, he says, including neurologists and psychologists, has adequately expressed what happens to us when we read, what exactly takes place in our brains and hearts when we take written words into ourselves - and yet: ‘Mysteriously, we continue to read without a satisfactory definition of what we are doing.’ Manguel’s intricate history of a once rare skill that is now an everyday act is fascinating, but it is his attempts to describe the impossible, the ‘bewildering, labyrinthine, common and yet personal process of reconstruction’ that for me are the highlights of the book.

One thing I’m certain of: the writer’s effort and what Manguel call the reader’s generosity cannot be separated. We write our books, journals, articles, poems letters and emails; we scratch words, phrases, names into prison walls, rock, the bark of trees; we write them with sticks in the sand, spray paint them onto buildings, daub them with lipstick in a toilet cubicle, prick them with needles into our skin. I make marks on the page or screen, assuming, hoping, that eventually someone (even if it’s only me) will read them. I read and whatever reading is, however different each reading is, however oblique the connection the words themselves link me to the person who put them there, and the others who have and are yet to read them…