Her three great loves sort of serve her at different points of her life.

Well, they are very different.

Her relationship with Pan is deeper than love.

It's being.

They are the same being.

And although they can be estranged, it's never a complete separation.

He's always there and he will always be there and they will always be together.

So how important do you think storytelling is just in our lives? day-to-day lives and the way that we speak to each other

Mm.

He let the story itself tell us.

He let the poetry itself work its magic on us, and we were, we were, um, bewitched.

It was quite extraordinary.

Um, so that's...

I, I, I remembered that later on when I was a teacher, and as often as I could, I let the poetry make work its own magic and didn't bother load them down with explanations for what it meant before I got there.

Um, so that was an example of how young I was when I was thinking about stories.

Mm.

What were the concepts that you were playing with here? It, it, you know, it struck me as innocence and original sin versus knowledge and consciousness.

You're absolutely right.

It has to do with-The old ideas of innocence and experience, that's the terms that William Blake, the great poet and painter, uh, used for the two contrary states of the human soul, as he put it.

We begin by being innocent, and then later on as we grow up, gradually we lose that innocence, but we become experienced.

This is a very old idea, which, um, I was playing with, and it s- seemed to me I could symbolize this by the dæmon.

It's another way in which the dæmon was very useful, because when you're a child in Lyra's world, your dæmon can change shape.

It can be a moth one minute, a, a snake the next, a dog, a cat, a cow, anything.

What got you to this place of showing us a damaged beloved character?

Mm-hmm.

When A.A. Milne was ed- associate editor of Punch, which was in the early part of the century, n- n- up to the Great War and through the '20s and so on, he published cartoon after cartoon of... which, which, which were all the same, the same joke.

It's a little child, often in a state of semi-nudity, in the bath or changing on the beach or something, saying something unbearably cute and sweet and charming, and, a- and adults looking on fondly.

Um, which actually curdle the stomach when you see them now.

I, I, I, I mentioned the Curtis.

I, I've got a copy of, a bound set of Punch for those years, which I inherited from my mother, and it wasn't until I'd looked through it a- a- and noticed this.

I was thinking about the children's literature and innocence and experience thing at the time.

Mm-hmm.