Sarah Manavis and her partner have a guilty secret. What they love to do most of all in private is… read out loud to each other. And, as she’s discovered, it has many surprising benefits
Neither of us can remember exactly how it happened, but we both agree we were probably a little drunk. It was December 2016. We had been dating for eight months. Even with the booze we were, by many measures, still shy around each other, fearful of spoiling the magic. Which is why neither I nor my partner can fathom the conversation that landed us either in bed or on the sofa with him reading A Christmas Carol out loud to me for an hour. It wasn’t something either of us had ever done with another adult. It wasn’t something we’d heard of adults in the real world ever doing. But the book kept getting read – always by my boyfriend, out loud to me, who listened with total fixation. It was finished before we left to be with our respective families for the Christmas break. And when we returned to be together again in January, we decided we wanted to do it again.
Seven years later, reading together is something we do regularly throughout the year. Without meaning to, we have read mostly classics – The Picture of Dorian Gray, Alice in Wonderland, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – always, without fail, returning to A Christmas Carol in December, me blurting out the big lines I’ve memorised over time like an eager audience member at a kids’ sing-along.
