Bookmark Reading Campaign
Last week was National Storytelling week and 2026 is the National Year of reading and I am beyond excited to have been asked to work with Bookmark Reading. This is a truly wonderful organisation that is trying to bridge the gap in children’s ability to read well.
1 in 4 children will leave primary school unable to read very well.
In 2025, 1 in 6 children on free school meals didn’t even own a book. This actually made me cry when I read these stats. Books have been my lifeline, my joy and my way of making sense of the world. They are genuinely my friends and have made me who I am, I simply couldn’t imagine a world without books.
I know how lucky I have been, as children, my mother would sit us in front of the fire and read us poetry (oh how we moaned!) and Shakespeare (oh how we sobbed!), we would wriggle and tiggle, desperately need the loo (a lot), need to tidy our rooms urgently, but that courageous woman persisted. She somehow taught us to appreciate language, to hear the voices, the nuances and wealth of knowledge that was ours for the taking. Even now after performing in numerous Shakesperian plays, there are certain phrases from the Bard that she would read to us that pop unbidden into my brain.
I have ensured that my children were also given the gift of reading. My daughter took to it like a bibliophilic duckling but my son when faced with the evils Of Biff, Chip and the awful Floppy, refused point blank to continue reading. We devised a scooting route up the lane where he would read a sentence, pop a blackberry treat into his little mouth and scoot as far as his sturdy four year old legs would motor him before returning and repeating – thank goodness it was a bumper blackberry year! If you are reading this blog, I suspect that you have had a similar encounter with mothers (and indeed Fathers – my Father created an entire world with an alien hero called Zob that he would make up at bedtime then illustrate once we were asleep) and also value the comfort, magic and power of words.
The actor Michael Sheen has recently created the National Welsh Theatre and was asked in an interview why Theatre is so important and it resonated with me on so many levels, in theatre but also in reading:
Theatre began as a way of bringing people together in one place, having a shared experience, a communal experience, and sharing what’s important to us. Saying these are our values, this is what we believe in, this is important to us and we do it in such a way that we all experience that together together and something sort of mysterious happens, not only do we witness ourselves and talk about who we are and what we’re trying to do here and why we’re here in the first place but also to do that together, it kind of bonds us and connects us and that ultimately is the importance of of the arts.
It’s not just a kind of luxury add-on, it’s fundamental to how we stay connected together as a community and process what we’re going through because it goes like that, and it’s gone, and then we know, if we’re lucky, we feel like we’re in a chain and the people are handing on the baton, but if you get disconnected from the past and disconnected from each each other then dark times are going to happen and I think that’s what we’re sort of trying to keep off at the moment and battling at the moment
It is a similar experience with books, they help us to form opinions, to relate to other people and to create a community. The new film version of Wuthering Heights is already causing enormous controversy (a 34 year old blonde Australian playing an 18 year old brunette Yorkshire lass with walls that appear to be her skin – with Robbie’s actual photographed mole…..) before it even premieres. I am excellent at muttering and chuntering about playing around with classics but if it gets people talking, if it inspires readers to pick up Wuthering Heights and it makes us use our brains, then this is surely rather wonderful? That feeling you get when you realise you and a new friend both adored “I Capture the Castle”, that you both have a secret penchant for Rupert Campbell Black and you would like to have been Beatrix Potter in another life. Oh the very deep joy!
Apparently youth Tik Tokkers (I think that is the expression…), inspired by the upcoming film are picking up copies of Wuthering Heights but are complaining that is unreadable, they are struggling to concentrate for long enough and can’t interpret the “dialect”. It’s definitely not on my favourite ever books list but by gum it’s a powerful read, the language, the wildness, the representative landscape.
This is why children need to learn to read, not just to be able to read classics (although we would be losing a wealth of knowledge, history and beauty if younger generations stop reading these extraordinary books) but also the basics of job applications, theory tests, menus etc etc. When I think of reading I don’t even think about the day to day reading that we need to perform. I think of the joy of an imaginary world that has been created in my head, the characters belong to me, the house looks the way I want it to and all those gorgeous little things happening to our biological neural network (yes I did just use science words – I read them on the internet…).
If you feel as passionately as I do about the power of reading, please head over to Bookmark Reading’s website here: Bookmark Reading and learn more about this wonderful initiative. Just one hour a week listening to a child read in person or online will help to create the storytellers of our future.
Sermon over! Please return to your books (I’m currently reading Jilly Cooper’s “Wicked” again, so I’m off to help Rupert with his GCSE English Literature study – he is deeply engrossed in Macbeth which is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays so thank you Mother -if he was real I would definitely be able to coach him and then probably marry him. Reader I married him (in my head, because if he was real he would be about 70 now…).