How This Began

Hello, my name is Robbie Stamp and I am in London on the afternoon of April the 11th, 2026. It is raining outside. I don't know whether you'll be able to hear that on the mic, but I want to tell you a little story about reading for my mother.

It started back on April the 11th, 2020, as the world was going into lockdown and none of us were sure when we were going to be able to see loved ones again, how long we were going to be separated. My mother was then in her early 80s. She was alone. My father had died some years before. And I wanted to be able to reach out every day without necessarily putting the pressure of a phone call on. And I thought what would be nice would be to read her a poem — mainly other people's, a few of mine — into my iPhone, and to send it to her on WhatsApp or a text message. And she could listen whenever she chose.

And that's what I did. And the first poem I chose was Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, or at least a large chunk of it, because it's quite a long poem, because of how much my mum had always loved it. And I sent it to her. And she responded by saying what a loving and lovely idea it was. And I thought, well, yes, we will do that again tomorrow. And I have done that, or something like it, every single day now for six years. Well, not quite every single day — and we'll come back to those little imperfections in just a second. We're over 2,192 days of reading now.

So through that spring and summer, I read a poem every single day. And it became a very beautiful moment in my day, a caesura, at the end of the day of emails and phone calls and keeping in touch with people via Zoom and so on that we all remember. And I just kept going.

As I was preparing this introduction I was reminded that within the first day or two I read a poem that I had written, which I think speaks rather beautifully to the connection and the lovingness in doing this through these years. It was a poem called The Turquoise Necklace, a poem for my mother. And I thought I'd read it as part of this introduction.

So through that spring and summer, I kept going and read a lot of poems. And then one day — it was 8th September 2020 — I thought I would record one of my favourite chapters from Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, that slightly strange, mystical chapter when the little otter Portly goes missing and is found by the great god Pan. It doesn't really fit with the narrative flow of the rest of the story. And Gilly loved it. It's a book that means a lot to us. It was a book that meant a lot to my dad. We used to go and see a stage show of it with the same actor who'd been playing Mole every year for years — I think he was in his 80s when we went to see it. So it's an important book for us, as it is for so many people.

And Gilly loved it. And I thought, well, shall I ask if you'd like the whole book? And she said she would. And so I read the whole of Wind in the Willows, chapter by chapter. And I thought, we'll keep going. And the irony not lost on either of us, I read Winnie the Pooh. I read a Moomintroll book, the wonderful Tove Jansson. And then I was reading T.H. White's The Once and Future King. And I could tell — loyal and loving as my mother is — she wasn't really enjoying this, from her messages back. And on a Christmas Eve read, I stopped in the middle of a very long, overlong, dull chapter — T.H. White fans, forgive me — about a medieval joust.

And when I sat to read on Christmas Day, I thought: I can't pick that up again. I know what I'll do. I am going to read a passage from War and Peace, one of my favourite passages, when the Rostov children get dressed up as mummers and go and visit a neighbouring landowner's house. And there are some extraordinarily beautiful descriptions of a troika race, a sled race across the snow. So I read that, and she did indeed love it. And I looked on Boxing Day and thought — oh, hang on a second, there are 360 chapters in War and Peace.

And so I did. Through 2021, I read a chapter a day of War and Peace. And we just kept on going.

War and Peace had been chosen because, well, it was in fact the fourth time I'd read it. I read it when I was 19, on Greyhound buses crossing America. I read it again in Greece when my children were tiny. And then some years later I read it again when I was extremely jet-lagged in South East Asia — I think it was in Vietnam — and couldn't sleep for about two days. And I remember reading about the snow and longing, I have to say, for the odd joke. But probably there are jokes there in the Russian, just not very many in the English translation. Fabulous as Anthony Briggs' translation is.

Anyway, I read it out loud, chapter by chapter, and we just kept going. And the novel I chose to read afterwards was Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens. And Dickens has been with me even longer than Tolstoy. I've loved Dickens since I was a teenager. I was lucky to be exceptionally well taught at school by two very charismatic teachers, Brian Robson and Harry Quinn. And in fact when I was 18, my birthday present was the collected works — novels and things — of Charles Dickens. And my beloved brother made me a treasure hunt around the house: a clue, and then another volume to find. And that's where Dickens began for me. I still have that collected edition downstairs. It's blue, with gold lettering on the backs.

So there's a lot of Dickens in what comes. Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, Our Mutual Friend. And in fact the book I'm reading at the moment, six years on, is David Copperfield.

So when do I do the readings? Well, most days, as I said, it's a caesura, a break in my day before I finish my working day and go downstairs and my wife and I have our supper together and catch up on the day.

And very often I'm sitting in my study in a rocking chair in which I was nursed as a child, which I think is rather wonderful, though I need to be careful not to move too much because it creaks. There's also a lovely beaten-up leather armchair in my study that I read in. And quite often I now sit at a big red leather desk, ink-stained, that my dad bought me when I was only 10 or 11. It's a very precious object. And I am now a man in my mid-60s.

I read in Wales, in a tiny little stone cottage, a family cottage that my mother and father bought back in the 1970s in the Black Mountains, at the foot of the foothills, on a rather special little triangle of land which is the meeting of trackways — an ancient trackway off the mountains and a trackway along the valley. And I sit in the parlour by the fire, or in a little room upstairs where my father used to play the piano for my mother. It's a place they adored, and the whole family has adored. When my grandsons first came down, it was four generations of us that have been going there now.

And just recently, I read out in the garden with the birds singing, over this Easter weekend. And there was a wonderful evening when the cows in the farm opposite were in the closest field across the lane, and you could hear that beautiful susurrating munch as they ate their grass. I don't think the microphone picked that up, but I could hear it.

I've read around the world when I've been away. I've read from a rooftop terrace on the Lycian coast. I've read from hotel rooms in Paris and Boston. And once I got on an empty carriage on the Elizabeth Line, waiting after a change at Reading on the way back from Winchester — an empty carriage, thankfully — to make sure that I didn't miss that evening's instalment.

When I read, there are quite a lot of imperfections, stumbles, mistakes. With the poems, I might have read ahead, but with the novels I tend to dive straight in and trust to the rhythm of the writers. These aren't audiobooks in any classic sense. I'm strictly an amateur. And you'll hear those mistakes. Things like: "you should never do that again," he whispered — because I haven't read ahead properly. My grip of accents can be a little varied. The Russian names particularly — please forgive my mangling. And certainly, if you were a professional actor, you'd wince at the fact that I've given a character an accent which I haven't quite remembered 55 pages on. But it's always done with gusto, and with enjoyment. You'll hear children in the background sometimes, and I do definitely stumble.

So I talked about 2,192 days and I definitely missed one Saturday. On some occasions I've recorded and then something has happened and I've failed to hit send until the following day — that's the most frustrating. And I think the Japanese have some words for this: the concept of wabi-sabi, the beauty of imperfection and incompleteness, and kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with gold, making the cracks part of the beauty rather than hiding them. So I've come to think — and I hope this isn't just self-justification — that there's something rather beautiful in this six-year adventure, in the imperfection of these recordings, and a beauty in the persistence and the practice of coming and doing this day after day.

It is a daily practice, and it's a lovely moment to move from my work to pick up the story wherever we've got to. Sometimes if I'm not going to be back in time, I might record in advance. Very occasionally I've banked a couple of days, and funnily enough one of those times was two or three of the longest chapters in War and Peace, and I ended up reading for about an hour and a half. But the average is probably eight or nine minutes, sometimes up to 20 or 25 for a particularly intense chapter that I just don't want to break.

And one of the most magical things of all is that my mother listens in bed at the end of her day, and she responds — every single day. I've catalogued now all of her responses, and I might find a way of making more of those available. She responds with something about that day's reading — a theme, an image, an idea, a thought. It is quite remarkable, and a phenomenal testament to my mother and her still phenomenally active mind, that she can hear once — maybe she sometimes listens twice — and she's picked something out. And I know these days typing isn't so easy. I know that her fingers tremble a little. But she still manages it, every single day.

And she also adds a blessing for sleep. A benediction for sleep. It's the most beautiful catalogue now of blessings. Sleep Welshly. Sleep Christmasly. Sleep restoredly. Sleep a cottage sleep. It's a whole beautiful language of goodnight. And we thought we'd make some of these blessings for sleep available too.

We thought that, as this is a rather special gift that we give each other — my reading for her every day, and her gift back of that attention and that listening, that sustained practice of care and attention — well, in the light of some of the things that are less positive about what's going on around us in the world, it would be good to remind of the other things that humans and relationships are capable of when we're being at our most constructive and our most loving, as opposed to our most destructive and our most unloving.

So where to finish. This reading journey has been not a labour of love. It's been a true gift of love that my mother and I have shared. And I hope that some of you out there come to sharing it in a way too, and to find new ways of sharing these wonderful stories. And yes, ways of loving each other.