Let’s talk reading, I never read for pleasure, all reading to me is research. The act of discovery. The act of learning. The art of pleasure is something very different. When I read I step through a door into worlds that I could never imagine. Reading can make me think of things, ideas pop out of the ether and drown beneath the eddies. Reading for me was in full flow at a tiny library in a year my teacher branded me a ‘retard’ (oh, yes that word was still very much in use in the 1980s by some teachers). Why was that word used? The simple answer was the teacher in question, a substitute who revealed why some teachers never get tenure, still believed that to measure a child’s reading age was to make them stand on a chair and read in front of a class. This weekly torture resulted…