WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL, my dad had a book called, I'm pretty sure, Life on Earth. It was part of a series published by Time-Life - and one of my earliest literary memories is returning, over and over, to an image of the Earth sectioned like an orange, showing the layers of its composition, from crust to molten core.

It was a folio volume, too big for me to hold when I first started reading it. I also remember how entranced I was by the images of fossils, trilobites that left their traces in the shale, how fascinated I was by paintings imagining life with the dinosaurs. Move over, Jurassic Park.

In many ways, it would be fair to say, books about science provided my first true taste of just how much you get from the secrets and wonders of literature. The first book I wrote, after all, was a science book - I remember it vividly. I was sure, at the age of 7 or 8, that I was going to be an astronomer, and accordingly decided to produce, on lined school paper, an account of the solar system.

I have to confess: I don't think I ever finished it - that's the real trick with books, and I still find it problematic today - but I recall how proud I was of my drawing of Saturn, my description of the Moon. The books I'd read made me feel I could be part of Universe, that I might have something to contribute too. Look at Newton and the apple: everyone has to start somewhere, right?

So I'm thrilled to take part in the Big Science Read: and even though I never became an astronomer, when you're reading this I'll be up at Jodrell Bank, at the second instalment of our First Move festival. It was shortly after I attempted my astronomical enterprise that I first saw the dish of the Lovell Telescope, looming up out the Cheshire plain like, as a friend of mine once described it, a cross between the Eiffel Tower and a Ferris wheel.

Or like something planted here on Earth by a civilisation older and wiser than ours: except, of course, it wasn't. Sir Bernard Lovell, who first conceived what's still the third-largest single radio telescope on the planet, is purely human, as I can attest.

His achievement, and - well into his nineties - his continuing fascination with what the Universe can teach us, is an inspiration to us all. May your reading take off like a rocket!

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