I bought another book yesterday

but it wasn't for me. 
I like to buy books for other people and this is one I have bought more than once. It is a book every child should have. It makes a lovely gift for a newborn baby.
I have given the book to both the newborns currently living in our little street. I have given it to many others too.
The book is old and yet new. Timeless? Yes, almost certainly.
It is AA Milne's "When we were very young". 
I am even happier I bought it now because, in this morning's paper, there was a tiny article many people will miss. It was about the importance of nursery rhymes in helping to develop language and literacy in children. It was about the way in which these are being eroded by the use of electronic devices and the failure of parents to repeat them, over and over, to their  children.
Some years ago now I was waiting at the railway station. It had been raining and a small boy was jumping in the puddles. He was splashing and laughing and enjoying himself immensely. Happily his mother had the good sense to allow him to continue doing it while we talked. When he tired of it for a moment and came back to his mother I told  him,
       "John had great big waterproof boots on...."
I recited it all to him. He wanted it again...and again.
His mother didn't know it. She didn't know AA Milne as an author. Her knowledge of Winnie the Pooh was simply as a cartoon. I told her about the poetry and suggested she look in the library. 
Now it seems that children don't even get the basic nursery rhymes, that Humpty Dumpty has fallen permanently off the wall and the cow no longer jumps over the moon and nobody falls down anymore.
That was apparently of concern to researchers. 
It worries me. Some of those things are hundreds of years old but they still matter. They teach rhyme and rhythm and repetition and, when they become familiar,  they are a comfort to a child who can recite them to himself or herself.
Ms W has to do a school project and she was asking me for ideas. I think I might suggest she look at the background to some nursery rhymes and why they were important from the very beginning.