After ‘bottling everything up for a long time’ the faithful pet, who has remained silent for many years, will spill the beans on the pair’s ‘pet hates and fur-vent passions’

Gromit, the canine star of the Wallace and Gromit animations, is “breaking his silence” and writing a memoir.

After “bottling everything up for a long time”, the moment has come for him to “spill the beans”, according to publisher Ebury.

Children are encouraged to get hands-on as the world’s leading stop-motion studio showcases its work in east London

What would Wallace – everyone’s favourite amateur Yorkshire inventor – look like with a moustache, straw boater and postal worker’s coat? Would a massive set of teeth suit his faithful beagle, Gromit? How about a nose shaped like a banana?

Such questions are answered by an illuminating and sometimes alarming exhibition at east London’s Young V&A that showcases the work of the world’s leading stop-motion outfit, the Bristol-based Aardman studios. Early sketches for Nick Park’s much-loved characters reveal that Wallace was once just a few bristles short of Hitler, while Gromit had fangs and the ability to speak.

Aardman’s tale of a group of plucky hens standing up to their pie-making masters was a favourite in our house, and – I realised – incompatible with my taste for burgers

By the age of 15, I was already torn between my love of animals and the deliciousness of a 99p McDonald’s Mayo Chicken. As a child I was a fussy eater, with meat and carbs being the mainstays, but as I got older I found it harder to justify eating meat. A lifelong animal lover and one of those annoying people who jokes about their “connection to animals”, I never missed an opportunity to pet a neighbourhood dog or say hello to a group of cows in a field.

So, going into my teenage years, I knew that eating meat was not really compatible with my way of thinking. But like most I found it easy enough to put those concerns to one side when I was scoffing a Greggs steak bake. Until at 15 I got the nudge I needed to take the leap into vegetarianism.