TURNING out a cupboard, I found a torn and tatty book and promptly sat on the floor to read it from cover to cover.

It took me two minutes. The adventures of Matthew Mouse, Billy Bunny and their enemy Wild Willie Weasel aren't exactly of epic proportions.

In a desperate bid for storage space, sentimentality has been banned. Unworn jewellery, souvenirs, hardly-used gadgets, duplicates of photos, they've all gone to the bin or the charity shop box. Even my teenage diaries, exercise books full of memories (or not; who on earth was the David I obviously fancied something rotten?) have gone to the shredder.

So Matthew Once More will follow them? Not on your life. The line has to be drawn somewhere and it's drawn at Matthew. He's a Second World War survivor and accompanied my bedtime every night for what must have seemed to the reader-aloud like eternity. Matthew is special.

On the same principle of know-it-by-heart familiarity, there must be equally battered copies of The Cat in the Hat, Yertle the Turtle or Green Eggs and Ham squirrelled away by a later generation of no-longer-children.

When it comes to the simple, mesmeric repetition small children love, Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr Seuss and born 100 years ago this month) was - probably still is - unbeatable. The rhythm of the words, the zany illustrations and the delicious touch of anarchy in characters like the Cat and Sam have sold 200m books, in 20 languages, worldwide.

To my shame, I brought up a deprived child who knew Dr Seuss only through next door's copy of The Cat in the Hat. It wasn't deliberate; he'd just passed me by.

Fortunately, the deprived child remedied the lack for both of us by buying his books in her student days, Dr Seuss being a perfectly acceptable author to have in one's room. It wasn't until 1996, five years after Seuss's death and staying with my student, that I picked up Green Eggs and Ham and realised what I'd missed. Written after a challenge to produce a story using only 50 different words, Dr Seuss used considerably fewer (go on, count 'em). I almost had it by heart before the offspring returned from the end-of-corridor pantry with breakfast.

I still love it and, when I announced to Sir that this week's column was about Dr Seuss, I got that haunted look which said: "If you so much as start 'I am Sam, Sam I am', I'm off to the greenhouse."

If you have small children, small grandchildren even, and they haven't entered the world of Seuss, do put it right. It'll cost no more than a decent Easter egg and be far better for them. You, of course, will be fit to scream when you hear: "Read it again, please," for the Nth time. Just as my mother was with Matthew