I Have Read This Book 412 Times

There is a book in my house that I have read four hundred and twelve times. I know its page turns by feel. I know that the third spread has a crease, and that the crease is my fault, and that if I turn the page from the left corner he will notice and start again from the beginning.

I know this book better than my wedding vows. I did not choose this. Nobody chooses this. You choose it once, at a library or a supermarket or because it was £3 and had a bear on the cover, and then you choose it four hundred and eleven more times.

The five stages

Enthusiasm. A lovely book. Genuinely charming. You do the voices. You add a little flourish on the page with the owl.

Performance. You are now doing a show. You have a rhythm. You have discovered that the bear's line reads better in a slight Scottish accent.

Autopilot. Your mouth is reading. Your brain has left the building and is thinking about a spreadsheet, a dentist appointment and whether you locked the back door.

Resentment. You begin to hate the bear. You notice the bear is smug. You notice the book has a plot hole. You begin to suspect the author has never met a child.

Surrender. You stop fighting it. You read the book. It takes four minutes and it is the most relaxed either of you will be all day.

I have begun editing it. In my version, the bear apologises and everyone sleeps through the night.

Why they do it

It is not a failure of imagination. It is the opposite. Small people live in a world where almost nothing is predictable — who picks them up, what is for dinner, whether the loud hand dryer in the toilets will happen. The same book, the same words, the same ending is a small, reliable country. They visit it to feel safe.

Which is lovely, and does not change the fact that I can recite it in my sleep, which I have.

The rotation

What helped, in ascending order of effectiveness:

• Three at a time. Only three bedtime books in circulation. The other forty live on a high shelf, out of sight. Novelty returns when the shelf rotates, roughly monthly.
• The library rule. One new book per trip, chosen by the child, with no editorialising from me.
• The flip. “You read it to me tonight.” They cannot read. They will narrate it from memory and it will be a completely different, much stranger book, and it is the best part of the week.
• The car version. An audio edition means the book exists outside bedtime, which takes some of the pressure off bedtime to be everything.
• The skip clause. I am allowed to skip one spread per reading. I have never been caught. I am at peace with this.

The part I did not expect

One day they will not ask for it. There will be no announcement. It will simply stop, the way the nap stopped and the pushchair stopped, and I will not know that the last time was the last time.

Four hundred and twelve is a lot. It is not, it turns out, infinite.