This is a global original podcast.

Hello and welcome to full disclosure with me, James O'Brien, a project that almost every week is designed pretty much exclusively to afford me the opportunity to spend more time than you normally do in interview context with people that I've always wanted to meet.

And the author and former Children's Laureate, Michael Morpurgo,

falls completely into that category,

although Michael Mulpergo, you won't know this, but we have met before.

Oh dear, this is the old memory thing going here.

There's no reason why you would remember.

I was just yet another parent

dragged along to a book signing by his daughter, but we had, I tried to explain, my daughter's got

quite odd intellectual interests, and I had tried to explain the Cogito to it, Descartes Cogito,

and I think therefore I am cogito over some,

which she then adapted when she was trying to explain to her sister where she likes Michael

Morpurgo so much, she adapted it into cogito ergo, Michael Morpergo, which I shared with

you at this signing and you turned to my daughter, completely ignored me, and said,

aren't Dad's annoying?

How did I really?

I think it's wonderful.

I shall certainly remember that better now.

But it delighted her, and of course it delighted me.

But that means that in our house you are already close to royalty, and it's part of the reason why I've always been so interested in you and and it occurred to me you're you you sort of reject orthodoxy that the idea that people

need to fit into certain categories or that people need to follow certain rules and behaviors is

one of the many themes that emerges from your book and when I I was preparing for this interview, I learned that your very, very earliest days were,

...