Welcome to Part 2 of Walking the Dog with the wonderful Stephen Mangon.

Do go back and listen to Part 1 if you haven't already

and do treat any young people in your life to a copy of his brilliant new children's book, Barry saves Christmas,

about a St Bernard who ends up becoming a total festive hero.

I absolutely loved it.

Really hope you enjoy part two of my chat with Stephen and do give us a

like and a follow so you can catch us every week. Here's Stephen and Ray Ray. So we've got our coffees now.

None for you, Ray. Well, when you went to Rada, I know it feels like part of that, if I'm right in thinking this, was prompted by your mum getting sick, wasn't it?

Yeah, I came back from university, managed to scrape a degree, didn't know what I was going to do.

I knew I wasn't going to be a lawyer. I kind of would have loved to have been an actor, but it just still didn't know what the root was

and how to make it work. And also, I don't know, I was just confused. And in September that year,

my mum got ill. It turned out she had colon cancer and she died in the following March. And so

that's sort of six-month period she was ill I was I was at home

anyway so it was an easy decision just to say well I'm going to help out and look after and

because you know there's all sorts of appointments of radiotherapy and chemo and all that kind

of stuff needed doing we didn't obviously know at the beginning what the story was going to be.

We were hoping that she would be okay.

But eventually it became clear she wasn't.

So she died at age 45.

Her mother, as I said earlier, my grandmother had been 47.

So you're suddenly looking at it and thinking,

wow, here I am in my

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