I am having a ball during story time right now.

I adore reading stories out loud, especially really good ones. I am loud and demonstrative and bawling and actressy. I read as I find: because language exists to be spoken.

So story time has always been a treat, for me as much as for the kids.

I have discovered anarchic youngsters’ literature like the peerless Winnie The Witch, in which Valerie Thomas sums up my life in a few well chosen words and Korky Paul paints me in a number of pleasing poses.

As the children grew older I turned to the classics: we have read The Railway Children, Narnian Chronicles, modern gems like I, Coriander, by Sally Gardner, and Smith, by Leon Garfield, and all those wonderful Unfortunate Events which Lemony Snicket relates so very well.

All three of us fell in love with Cressida Cowell’s beautifuly written bawdy brilliance. Reading those old Norse legends re-worked for a seven year old showed me our endless ability to reinvent and retell tales which go back thousands of years.

These stories are all best  spoken out loud. Storytelling is an art which stretches back for millennia. It is aural: we hear it in our heads. It is the rhythmic rise and fall of speech as it should be spoken.

The other day Maddie thrust a book in my hand to read at bedtime. I have avoided it for, ooooh, maybe three years, because it had Trouble written all over it.

But when I finally gave in, I realised that this slim volume was my Green Eggs and Ham. It was entitled “You’re a Bad Man Mr Gumm”, and it was by a man called Andy Stanton.

Stanton studied English at Oxford, but as he puts it so succinctly, they kicked him out. Among his jobs he has held his own as a stand-up comedian. His favourite expression is Good Evening, and his favourite word is Captain.

And the man is a genius. In every sentence lurks a surprise, there’s a twist round every corner, and each book is a romp of such proportions I find it almost impossible to stop reading him out loud. Every sentence inspires admiration verging on the envious.

My ambition is to read his words out loud to at least 200 children, all at once. And I shall, I shall.

Describing him is impossible: only reading his work can bash you over the head with that silver kipper you so desire.

So I’ll just give you the opening paragraph of his opening volume.

“Mr Gumm was a fierce old man with a red beard and two bloodshot eyes that stared out at you like an octopus curled up in a bad cave.

“He was a complete horror who hated children, animals, fun and corn on the cob. What he liked was snoozing in bed all day, being lonely and scowling at things.”

Every night I am first in the stampede to get the book, and the children are going to bed late because I can’t stop reading,  it is just so darn funny.

God knows what the neighbours are making of it all. I do all the voices from the little village of Lamonic Bibber, where the action takes place.

What is extraordinary is how Stanton controls the pace and rhythm of his writing so perfectly. It’s a madcap, breathtaking pace suited exactly to comedy. Every reading begins to seem very much like a one-woman-show.

The way we use adjectives and similes and metaphors and adverbs is vital; but I can’t help wondering if all these mean nothing, if they are not framed in the rhythm of spoken language.

But man cannot live on Mr Gumm alone.

On my bedside shelf is a book which was thought to have caused two earthquake shocks which hit London just after its publication in 1749.

Apparently the earthquakes were the result of Henry Fielding’s wickedness.

As Hogarth drew, Fielding wrote, and Tom Jones is an earthy examination of the baser side of human nature.

It follows Jones from his questionable birth and adoption by a local member of the gentry, though a series of bawdy adventures, until he is finally rescued and redeemed by the love of a good woman.

It is base, really it is. But oh, what a storyteller that Mr Fielding is. His work is a rumbustious outspoken speaking-out, and it is never more mischievous and impish than when read out loud.

Stories, they are meant to be heard. I overuse semicolons precisely because of the rise and fall of speech in Fielding’s storytelling. He knows when to suspend, when to draw to a close; when to state simply, and when to draw his listener along lanes and alleyways before his sentence reaches a conclusion.

But for me, the master of us all, when it comes to the rise and fall of speech, is Dylan Thomas.

I will never forget the first time I listened to Under Milk Wood. It was like coming home. Here was a man’s unflinching, affectionate, haunting account of life in a small village.

But it isn’t an account, is it? It is so much vaster than that, a landscape of the unspoken. Thomas conjures up wonder at the tiny beloved minutiae of lives in a seaside town, using the rocking to and fro of  the gentlest of speech.

His words flow like music. They are poetry in motion, and they make me humble:

“Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the street in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Only you can see, in the blinded bedrooms, the combs and petticoats over the chairs, the jugs and basins, the glasses of teeth, Thou Shalt Not on the wall, and the yellowing dickybird-watching pictures of the dead.

“Only you can hear and see, behind the eyes of the sleepers, the movements and countries and mazes and colours and dismays and rainbows and tunes and wishes and flight and fall and despairs and big seas of their dreams.”

The very words make me want to rush out and give the King’s shilling to enough people to form a cast, and read it from beginning to end.

Ah, spoken language is lilting, not just in English but in any language. Because between the lines, somewhere in among those sound waves, is a wealth of meaning waiting to be heard.