Back in 1972 Meg and Mog arrived on the scene (in a flash of lightning, out of a cauldron, the wonderful result of a spell gone not quite according to plan, I like to think), the creation of Helen Nicoll and Jan Pieńkowski and they’ve been delighting children ever since. I loved their books when I was little and now my children share my laughter when we read the stories of crazy japes and spells gone wrong which come together to form the Meg and Mog series.

With Halloween not far off the timing couldn’t have been better for the release of the first new Meg and Mog book in four years. Meg Goes to Bed is a worthy addition to the collection. Although the story is perhaps not quite as satisfying as Meg at Sea, Mog’s Missing or Meg’s Car, many features that you would want to find in a quintessential Meg and Mog story are here to delight in.

There is an apparently simple scenario – Meg, Mog and Owl are hungry – but yet disaster still manages to strike. There’s a classically illustrated recipe for a spell, followed by the inevitably unintended results when the magic words are incanted. Meg’s catch phrase (“Oh dear, oh dear“), Mog and Owl’s nigh on obligatory crash landing and the idea that hard work and perseverance rather than the swish of a magic wand will get you what you need all add up to making this a book that my children were thrilled to read and that I was very pleased to add to our collection.

Pieńkowski’s bold, graphic design influenced illustrations, with their bright, sheer palette and tone are dramatic and exciting. In Meg Goes to Bed the articulation of the familiar characters, Meg, Mog and Owl is slightly less smooth than in earlier Meg and Mog books, but then I would not expect characters which have been drawn for almost 40 years to be identical today with their first incarnations. Indeed when I asked Jan about this as part of an interview I held with him (which will be published on Monday) he had this to say: “Change is inevitable… The Great Masters have “an Old Style”, perhaps humble illustrators are allowed to have one too!“.

An additional joy of reading Meg Goes to Bed was that it made a great early reader for M – in fact she has taken great pride in reading it to J. As M said, it’s a “real” book (rather than one written as an early reader), with engaging, familiar illustrations. Seeing M’s happiness at being able to read a brand new story from a series I had previously read to her when she was younger doubled my delight in this book. I’ll certainly be encouraging M to read more Meg and Mog books to me and J in the next few weeks

Although Meg isn’t very successful when it comes to making potions, she clearly enjoys throwing all sorts of ingredients into her cauldron. The same could be said of me and my girls, and so, with inspiration from this recent post from A Bit of This and A Bit of That, we spent an afternoon making up spooky spells and potent potions.

Into clear glass jars the girls poured (vegetable) oil, water and Golden Syrup (US friends could substitute corn syrup I believe). We used a little food colouring to give the water and syrup distinct colours – blue for water and red for syrup.

Not only were the girls able to create an essential feature of the perfect potion – bubbles…

…they also learned about specific gravity: the three liquids differ in density and so when they are left to settle distinct layers can be seen in the jars. Oil is less dense than water, so it floats about the blue layer, whilst syrup is more dense than water and so sinks below to form a red layer at the bottom.

We checked this out by changing the order in which we added the liquids to the jars – sure enough whatever the order we added them, they always layered themselves the same way.

After all the hard work of making multicoloured potions, the girls relaxed with “magic milk” – regular milk dyed again with food colouring, which I allowed them (as a rare treat!) to blow bubbles in.

Nothing beats green milk with bubbles in, I can tell you!

Meg Goes to Bed: ** (2 stars)

Whilst brewing our potions we listened to:

There’s also a terrific listing of Halloween related songs (mostly) for kids at Zoogobble – loads of wonderful music that I definitely recommend you check out.


Other activities which would work well with this book include:

Do make sure you’re back on Monday when my interview with Jan Pieńkowski will go live, followed by a chance on Tuesday to win your own copy of Meg Goes to Bed!

Disclosure: I received my copy of Meg Goes to Bed gratis from the publisher, Puffin Books and my thanks go to them. This review, however, reflects my own and honest opinion.

… And Dad – this one’s for you and Grandpa and all the wonderful tools and strange bits of equipment you’ve shared with us – if only having a fragile glass tube with mercury in it wasn’t a hazard in our house

Whilst it was still pouring (but in the spirit of positive thinking) we made some super strength bubble mixture using this recipe:

1/2 cup of concentrated washing up liquid
5 cups water
2 tablespoons glycerine (available at the pharmacy or supermarket)

We mixed the ingredients together slowly, trying to not create any bubbles whilst we did so and then we left the mixture overnight to settle. I don’t know quite what difference this makes, but any recipe you find for homemade bubbles along these lines says that the final mixture will work better if you leave it. So leave it we did (much to the annoyance of M who wanted to use it straight away, of course).

The next day the sun was indeed shining (hooray!) and so we prepared our bubble blowing equipment – a butterfly net and large plastic racket from Poundland, divested of their netting/strings to leave just the frames, the idea being that we would use these as jumbo versions of the small sticks usually found inside bottles of bubble mixture.

To complete the picture, out came our bubble machine (with regular shop bought bubble mixture – I’ve read that home made stuff will clog up the mechanism, and didn’t want to risk it) and -Voila! – our garden was transformed into a shimmering bubble fest to the delight of us all.

When we’d had our fill of bouncing around the garden bursting the smaller bubbles, and trying to make mega bubbles we caught our breath back on the sofa inside with Bubble Trouble by Margaret Mahy and Polly Dunbar, a wonderful poem/story in rhyme warning of the perils of playing with bubbles…

One day little Mabel is blowing bubbles when her baby brother gets caught inside one and blown away, over the town, higher and higher into the sky. Although the baby quite enjoys the experience (“The baby didn’t quibble. He began to smile and dribble,/ For he liked the wibble-wobble of the bubble in the air.“) his sister, her family and gradually all the townsfolk he floats past are indeed concerned about his fate. Determined to save her brother, Mabel climbs on the shoulders of the other children but just as she reaches out the villain of the story, Abel, shoots at the bubble with his sling and suddenly the future does not look so bright for the boy in the bubble…

Margaret Mahy’s poem is *so* much fun to read, with a great rhythm and clever use of alliteration and rhyme. The vocabulary is more challenging than that used in many books aimed at young children, including words like “cavil”, “cavorting” and “nefarious”) but I found my 4 year old was curious about these strange and special words, the fact that they are unusual only adding to the magic of the story. My 1 year old also enjoyed the poem a great deal even if the vocabulary was clearly way beyond her – the great musicality of the text carries reader and listener along with ease.

(In the spirit of honest parenthood I ought to put one small warning out there, perhaps: if you’re reading this lovely book when you’ve just been woken up at first light by a child who is not interested in the meaning of sleep and you haven’t yet had a coffee many of the lines could double as tongue twisters that may prove a challenge until you’re up and running!)

Polly Dunbar’s illustrations are cheerful and bright and have succeeded in making M wish she could blow a bubble around her little sister! Interestingly, another version of Bubble Trouble is available illustrated by Tony Ross, but we haven’t yet had a chance to look at it to see how it compares.

When the rain returned the next day we attempted to continue the bubble mayhem indoors by making our own bubble bath solution. We used this recipe (sorry – I haven’t kept a note of where it came from):

1 cup Soap Flakes
1 cup Water
2 – 3 tbsp Glycerin
1 drop Essential Oil / Fragrance Oil (although we actually left this out)

But… it didn’t work at all well. Although there were some bubbles in the water as I agitated it whilst the taps ran, by the time the bath was full and the girls got in, there were barely any bubbles left and instead the water looked like it had a horrible scum floating on the top (and I swear this is nothing to do with my (*ahem*) skills at cleaning the bath )

To rescue the situation we added some colour and magic crackles, but today we’ve given in and gone to Boots to buy a commercial brand of bubble bath! (If anyone knows a recipe for home made bubble bath that does work, please let me know!)

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Bubble Trouble:

Our soundtrack these past few days has included Paul Simon’s Boy in the Bubble and on the piano I’ve stumbled through “I’m forever blowing bubbles” accompanied on the kazoo and drums by M and I. Next bubble day I’d like to try painting with bubbles like this and like this. I’d also like to try the bubble wands that Monkey Lobster has instructions for (found via the Crafty Crow) – we didn’t have many containers that were big enough to lay our giant wands flat in, and perhaps this problem would be overcome by using Monkey Lobster’s design.