Yesterday was World Book Day, and children across the country were invited to go to school dressed as a character from a book. My 10-year-old son, not a big fan of dressing-up, got a white shirt and a flat cap and said he was the ghost of a chimneysweep, from David Walliams’ Awful Auntie.

There’s a lovely news story doing the rounds this morning about Liam Scholes, an 11-year-old from Manchester who went as the male lead in Fifty Shades of Grey, dressed in a grey suit, carrying a face mask and cable ties. The school judged the costume inappropriate, excluded the poor lad from the group photographs, and politely asked him to rebrand himself as James Bond–apparently a suitable role-model for children of this age.

Good on Liam for exposing the perversity (as it were) of World Book Day, and the sanitized notion of the book that we too often fall back on. We need to let children know that books are NOT good for you. That’s why so many adults love reading.