Speaking to Pat Kenny this morning, Michael Palin explained how became a diarist after giving up smoking in 1969.

After the birth of his first child, just before Monty Python began, Palin decided to kick the habit cold turkey.

"When our first son was born, he wanted to grab his dad and be picked up for a cuddle but I had to get the cigarette out of my mouth and into the ashtray and then he'd try to eat this ashtray. So I thought it best to give up. I gave up sort of cold turkey and just had this surge of willpower."

Impressed by his own willpower, he decided to apply similar thinking to a different discipline. 

"I thought about what else I wanted to do with my life that I never had the willpower to do and one of those things was keep a diary. And so I've kept a diary fairly regularly ever since."

"It enslaves you, but now we're in a partnership together"

Pat and Michael discussed the demands of maintaining a journal but also the content that goes into a diary.

"Somehow anything you put in it is interesting" says Palin. "When I look back on the diaries, it's not the big events of my career that are what I find interesting, it's the little odd things like the fact that we had a window cleaner with vertigo. It's the little things that don't seem important on the time but are telling in ten, twenty, thirty years time. The process of keeping a diary enslaves you, but now we're in a partnership together."

Michael Palin's new book is entitled "Travelling to Work: Diaries 1988 - 1998"