Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the Waterstones Children’s Laureate, 2024-2026 writes on his love of reading for the Scottish Book Trust Christmas Appeal in partnership with The Herald

When I was a child my mum took me to the library. A lot. We lived with my grandma in a two bedroom flat. Mum, Dad, me and my brother in one room. Grandma - my dad’s mum - in the other. It was only decades later - when we were both caring for my dad - that mum told me that what she was looking for in the library was not books but some respite from a cramped, stressful situation.

I don’t remember the hardship. All I remember was happily cuddling up with her on the big chairs and listening to stories. Stories helped her turn a difficult time into a happy childhood. A lot has been said about how beneficial reading is for education but surely that happiness is vastly more important. Shared happiness is a great, enduring bond.

For my term as Waterstones Children’s Laureate I’m focused on the way shared reading - especially in those first crucial thousand days of life - helps build the apparatus of happiness within a child. I’ve used that phrase - “the apparatus of happiness” - a lot.

It sounds poetic but on a visit to the lab of the neuroscientist Professor........

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