My daughter slumps in the crook of my arm. She’s so tired she keeps rolling her head on to my shoulder and rubbing her eyes with tiny fists. But those fists are clenched with determination. We are in her bedroom and she won’t sleep until she gets her story so, to delay this further, she rejects every book in our house, save for one: a bumper compendium of nursery rhymes designed explicitly to test my patience.
She must know I don’t like this book, both because I am a learned and sophisticated man and because I show her every other book beforehand. She glides right past her old favourites, made from thick card and showing animals or vehicles with paws, bumpers, ears and headlamps made from different strips of material – Velcro, cotton, laminated card – solemnly intoning that this puppy or that bus cannot belong to her because it’s too scratchy, soft or shiny. Those are real literature, even if I do wonder about the salience of teaching two-year-olds that they should know, intimately, the texture of an animal’s mouth or a bus’s exhaust pipe. None of which matters as she just wants me to read a 200-page volume of every nursery rhyme you’ve ever heard of, and several dozen you haven’t.
