Even to this day these still get read as a bedtime book and we still love the frenetic energy and fun characterisations in both.
Starting with "The Runaway Dinner" by Allan Ahlberg and Bruce Ingman, we begin with the tale of a seemingly ordinary little boy (amusingly) named Banjo Cannon. Banjo loves a sausage for his dinner but on one fateful day, the sausage decides he doesn't want to be scoffed, and does a runner - swiftly followed by the rest of Banjo's dinner, his cutlery, plate, chair and table!
A grand chase ensues as we begin to find out a little more about each character from the speedy soss to the cute peas (all of which have their own names, don't you know!)
It's a brilliant, brilliant romp and kids can't resist the fun details that segue in from Al and Bruce's other books. In fact if you look very carefully you'll spy a bit of intermixing between this and...
This time a pencil begins to draw a world, but soon the characters in that world demand changes! There's only one thing for it, the Pencil needs to draw something very special - a rubber!
BUT the rubber goes on the rampage, and gets far too carried away rubbing things out. The pencil is desperate to save the day, but what on earth can defeat a rubber?
We won't give away the ending! But in researching for this I realised we'd somehow missed "The Pencil" from our review schedule back when we were first starting out but it'd be an instant book of the week if we had, so go geddit buster!
These two books are treasures and we can't recommend them highly enough, both are absolute works of genius and Allan and Bruce are amongst our favourite PB creators of all time, their work is just so glorious.
Original Review Links:
The Runaway Dinner
The Pencil - N/A (why on EARTH didn't we review this one?!)