I’m four. Tucked up in bed, surrounded by teddy bears, I’m reading my first proper book by myself. Peter Rabbit is up to mischief; Mr McGregor is making me nervous; Beatrix Potter is drawing me in. Six years old, and I’m having to hide Harry Potter, Voldemort and the magic in my bedside cabinet, because it’s too scary and I can’t read on any further. Eight, and Roald Dahl is showing me the true depths of the human imagination, so much bigger and so much more exciting than I ever thought possible. Ten: I am queuing up outside Waterstones to get Jacqueline Wilson’s latest book signed by the author herself.

It is not enough to say that I loved reading as a child. I loved cycling, craft and TV, but I never felt like I might actually become those things. Riding my bike round and round the car park next to my house didn’t make my mind feel like it might burst out of my head because it simply needed more space to take it all in. Cutting and sticking never seemed so fantastic that I wanted to stop, in case I used up my lifetime quota of it too quickly. Not once did the thought strike me that Blue Peter might just be all I ever needed.

No, I never did seem to find anything quite like reading. I loved it – there was so much out there that I wanted to read, digest, cram into my brain – that one book rarely felt enough: I would regularly have anything up to four on the go, simply because I couldn’t bear the thought of not reading any one of them at that moment in time. Every minute spent with one book felt like a minute not with another.

Each new book was a new den – a hideout, shut off from the rest of the world. I would climb inside and make myself at home, filling every crevice, top to bottom, wall to wall. But the books would fill me, too, opening my mind, pushing it past fresh boundaries, setting it on fire. I read Judith Kerr, Allan Ahlberg, Francesca Simon, Jeremy Strong, and fell in love with writing before I’d even tried, because I knew that, somehow, I had to get closer to this thing that I’d discovered, that possibly no one else knew about. And how could they know about it? Books were too special – too mine – to belong to others.

Nowadays, I read less. Or perhaps I just read differently. I read for essays, for supervisions, for work – a page here, a chapter there. Pitiful, almost sacrilegious fragments of something beautiful, desecrated. And I think I feel different because of that. I think I am aware of the creaking, grinding of rusty cogs – once so fresh and shiny – turning begrudgingly somewhere in my brain. It’s not about intelligence – reading less hasn’t made me any less clever, or earned me any lower grades – but something has definitely changed, disappeared. Something more ethereal than mere intellect, lying somewhere in between creativity, imagination and spirit. I’m the same, but ever so slightly less, living outside of that rich, heady world of literature that I once called home.

But the damage is far from irreparable, and, at some point last year, I finally realised this, and decided to do something about it. So, now, I am on a mission to read more – for pleasure, crucially. Not snippets here and there, quickly skim read and soon forgotten, but whole, entire books.

And, in the last few months, that’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve become reacquainted with old friends – Nancy Mitford welcomed me back in a way only she could: sharp, shrewd but warm – and made new ones, too. I’ve read Mindy Kaling, Caitlin Moran, Robert Galbraith, Lena Dunham. I read Tina Fey’s memoirs in an afternoon. I’m currently working my way through Maya Angelou’s autobiography.

Of course, I haven’t read as much as I would have liked – Cambridge has little patience with such luxuries. Or perhaps I simply never could. But I’ve read, and, in the process, I’ve been reminded of something that, perhaps, I had forgotten: that reading is one of the most vital things – vital, in every sense of the word – that you can do with your mind.

Those innumerable voices you hear echoed back to you when you call out to a book– they are the lifeblood of creativity and imagination. They are 3D glasses, allowing you to see the world in a new, magical way. They are Catherine wheels, rockets, Roman candles – setting the sky alight. The silence without them is deafening.