Going back to school for me began with a series of block printed cards made by Mrs Winterson to hand out to classmates. As far as I am concerned, September starts with the book of Jeremiah: The summer is ended and we are not yet saved.

Saved or not saved, this is the week when the roads re-fill with mothers practising their Formula One skills in an effort to launch their children into a new academic year. Text-books and timetables take over from long summer days; the bank holidays are done, and the shops are trumpeting their unseasonable insanity about only a hundred and something days to Christmas.

No wonder everybody looks a murderer.

My antidote is a book – well quite a few of them, and none the book of Jeremiah, nor the 3 for 2 promotions, the celebrity biographies, or even the prize pugs on offer from the Booker. All of that is part of the feeding frenzy that turns reading into a public circus rather than a private act. Call me old-fashioned, but books have their own rhythm, closer to the seasons than to the market place. A good book can’t be rushed, which is one of the reasons why reading is a powerful counterpoint to the lunacy of modern life, where everything has to be rushed. In a world where there isn’t any time, making time to read is not a luxury – it is a way of slowing down the hours. Reading reclaims time – we always get back more than we give, like meditation, the time spent with a good book is deepening and freeing. Even stopping for ten minutes to read a poem is enough to take your hand off the panic button. I carry poetry with me wherever I travel so that I can remember how to live. By that I mean so that I can remember what is and isn’t important – what does and doesn’t matter. It’s a deep-breathing exercise for the soul.

If reading reclaims time, it re-aligns time too. Time for us is always slipping away – we talk about losing time, finding time, making time, and taking time. The well-being we feel when we don’t notice time, because we are happy or engrossed or in love, is the result of those rare moments when time inside us and time outside us are not in conflict. Reading is another way of allowing this to happen, and as it becomes a habit, like all habits it affects the rest of our behaviour too. No question, reading is good for you. 

So with the turn of the season comes a chance to pour a glass of wine and write down all those books or poems waiting to be read. It doesn’t matter whether they are new or old. It doesn’t matter if some of them have been just waiting to be read again. Books are patient and find their moment. It always surprises me how the best books go on yielding something different as you come back to them at various times. I started Camus, The Stranger, yesterday, after a gap of thirty years. I’m partly cross and partly dazzled, but I’m thrilled to be back in it, not least because it has opened up my own little time capsule, sealed and left so long ago. That’s the thing with good books isn’t it? They are generous enough to hold our memories for us.

So this week I am going to go to a couple of independent bookshops, of the kind where you can browse around in the back shelves, and be surprised by something unexpected. It’s easy enough to trawl through the new releases, but I want to snout among the oddities too. The books I haul home may not all be read, and many will be read and given away before Christmas. The pleasure is in the discoveries, and in the act of reading itself.

E.M Forster’s famous ‘Only Connect’ is harder than it sounds, especially in a world like ours, disconnected even from something as simple as the seasons. Well, this is the harvest time, and autumn and winter follow, so a time for gathering and storing feels right.

I’m going to make a couple of piles of books and squirrel through them, and when life drives me really demented, I’ll just grab one and hold it up to my face like an oxygen mask.

You could try this on the school run; it will give the kids something to talk about.

September 2, 2006