The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

– All-butter croissants: Sainsbury’s, ‘Taste the Difference’. Jam: Bonne Maman Conserve, strawberry. I drink the orange juice from a type of Ikea glass called Svepa which, through a process of trial and error, I have determined is the perfect size for consuming a carton of orange juice in equal measures over four successive mornings. Then I go out and disembowel a dog.

      The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is said to have remarked that he didn’t mind what he ate, as long as it was always the same thing, although I imagine Wittgenstein rarely, if ever, bagged up his own packed lunch. If I am working in London, I always take the following with me: a ham sandwich, a tomato, a bag of baked crisps and an apple, which I eat at my desk.^fn3 If I am having lunch in a restaurant with a colleague or a client, I still make and pack this exact combination of items and eat it twelve hours later on the train on the way home, where it tastes absolutely desperate. Why do I always do this? Because I don’t have the energy to be bothered to think about doing something different, even though the thing I am doing will, I know, stick in the throat.

      fn3. ‘I sometimes feel like Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, feeling it appropriate to give an account of his dietary habits, like his taste for “thick oil-free cocoa”, convinced that nothing that concerns him could be entirely without interest.’ Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies.

      (FYI Mrs Miller skips breakfast – tut – and makes her own sandwiches only infrequently – tsk – although she does put a banana in her handbag and keeps a box of Oat So Simple instant porridge in her desk drawer.)

      One or both of us leaves home at about 6.30am, certainly no later than 6.35am. We both prefer the 6.44am train, run by Southeastern Trains. There is very little chat on the 6.44; many of the other passengers are asleep. (The 7.03 lands you at Victoria at the height of the rush-hour crush, while the 7.22 usually fills up by Chatham, and its human traffic, having had an extra hour in which to wake up, make-up and caffeinate, is significantly rowdier.) But the 6.44am train has its drawbacks, too. We both travel in fear of sitting next to the woman who boards the train at Sittingbourne and without fail performs the same daily manicure: fingernails with emery board till Rainham, application of hand cream at Gillingham, greasy massage to Rochester. Once treatment is complete, the hands’ owner takes a power nap, mouth agape, to Bromley South, where she leaves the train. We refer to the woman as ‘Mrs Atrixo’. If she sits down next to one of us, we text the other: ‘Eek! Atrixo!’

      Our train arrives in town. Then follows the bus or Tube ride. Then work. Work lasts all day, sometimes longer.

      Meanwhile, at his nursery, my son enjoys a day of structured and unstructured activity in the company of a mixture of children and young women – few of whom are older than eighteen and none of whom are older than twenty-five. He might play with the Duplo™. He might pretend to be Doctor Who for a while. He might tell one of the girls what he got up to on his last ‘Mummy day’. We don’t know for sure because we’re not there. He usually has his breakfast and his lunch and his tea sitting at a little table with some of his friends. Of course, they are only his friends by virtue of being the children with whom he is obliged to pass much of his time (three days in every seven). They are more like colleagues than friends. At the end of the day, they all sit around the television, children and helpers, and watch a video until someone, a parent or grandparent, comes to collect them.

      Sandwich, bath, a little more television, bed, stories, sleep. Also a telephone call from the parent – or parents – who may or may not get home in time to say goodnight.

      The parental evening routine follows a very similar pattern, with half a bottle of wine and maybe some cooked food, sometimes even cooked from scratch. Sleep follows swiftly at 10pm, unless some detail of the day sticks in mind, some professional slight, some office skirmish to come.

      That’s how the week goes. Weekends and family days are less restricted but still have their structures and patterns and duties – paperwork, haircuts, the weekly shop, visits from friends with children, long car journeys to close family. There is some fun but there is little in the way of spontaneity. We do not have the time. Then Monday comes around and we start counting all over again. ‘This year, next year, sometime, never …’

      I assume we are happy. Certainly we love each other.

      We have been working parents for three years. In that time I have, for pleasure, read precisely one book – The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

      It is Thursday, and Thursday is a Daddy day. So we have packed the Wet Wipes and a change of trouser and after lunch the boy and I set off for Broadstairs.

      Broadstairs is half an hour up the coast from where we live. For a part-time child-minding parent, it has several attractions to recommend it. The bay encloses a sandy beach with swings and trampolines. There is a small, old-fashioned cinema. Along the promenade, overlooking the bay, lies Morelli’s famous ice-cream parlour. And the long walk downhill from the station to the seafront almost guarantees an afternoon nap for members of the party travelling by pushchair.

      However, this is a Thursday in late November. The cinema is closed. The swings and trampolines are shrouded in winter tarpaulins and the sea is too boisterous and cold for paddling. The rain that greets us at the station thickens as we trudge into town, facing the wind, and we have to shelter in the doorway of a charity shop to unpack the PVC rain cover, which flaps about uncontrollably until skewered to the metal frame of the buggy by ruddy red hands – mine. No one feels much like a snooze.

      In Morelli’s, we are the only people eating ice creams. We also appear to be the only customers younger than sixty. Around us, pensioners eke out their frothy coffees and try not to make eye-contact with me. It has been my experience over the last few years that people are generally more at ease with the dad and toddler combo on TV than in reality, where it seems to disconcert them. Is the mother dead? Are we witnessing an abduction? In spring and summer, this place is full of life, with holidaying families and little children boogieing in front of the jukebox. But today the view across Viking Bay has vanished behind fogged-up windows.

      We leave Morelli’s and walk up the promenade to the Charles Dickens museum. Hmm, some other time. But around the corner on Albion Street is the Albion Bookshop. I yank the pushchair up the steps, holding open the heavy door with one foot, and once inside try to find a corner where we shan’t be in anyone’s way, even though the shop is empty. Down the street a little way is another Albion Bookshop, a huge, endearingly dingy secondhand place – fun for Dad, who could easily lose hours in there, but less so for three-year-old boys. So while Alex decides which Mr Men book he would like, I browse this shop’s smaller selection of titles. There is a cookery section, a local interest section – Broadstairs In Old Photographs, etc. – and a Dan Brown section, with his four novels to date: The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and the other two, and a plenteous range of spin-offs and tie-ins: Cracking the Da Vinci Code, Rosslyn and the Grail, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.^fn4 On the fiction shelves, between Maeve Binchy and The Pilgrim’s Progress, I am surprised to find Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I pick it up – small format, £3.99, good value. The grinning cat on the front cover^fn5 makes Alex laugh, so I take it to the till along with his choice, Mr Small.

      fn4. I am aware The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published long before The Da Vinci Code. The Albion Bookshop has since closed down.

      fn5. The book is orange, the cat is black.

      It is time for us to go home. On the long climb back up the hill to Broadstairs station, the combination of sea air and ice cream finally catches up with Alex and he nods off. We find the space on the train next to the disabled toilet and, with my son still asleep and nothing to do for half an hour, I start to read.

      ‘Mr Small was very small. Probably the smallest person you’ve ever seen in your whole life.’

      No, better wait till Alex wakes up. I turn my attention to the other book.

      ‘At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch’s Ponds …’

      Later that evening, after reading Mr Small three times in a