Shall I tell you a story? Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Then let's begin...

And that naughty tiger doesn't stop there. He eats Daddy's tea too; right from the saucepans on the stove. He eats all the food in the cupboards and downs all the milk from the bottles. He drinks all the water from the tap. When everything that can be eaten has gone, he leaves. Just like that. But he does say "thank you for the lovely tea", so I suppose he's a polite tiger at least. Sophie and her mother are worried. Sophie can't have a bath - the water's all gone. I'll tell you a secret - I love this part of the story and so do all the many children to whom told it, not least my own. We're not quite sure what to think. No water in the tap at all? Could a tiger really do that? Equally worrying for Sophie and Mummy is that there is no supper for Daddy, either. What shall they do? Just then, Daddy comes in. Sophie and her mother tell him all about it. "Never mind," he says, "we'll go out for dinner." And they do, it's late and, "all the street lamps were lit, and all the cars had their lights on, and they walked down the road to a cafe". Oh, it was magic for Sophie, being out past bedtime with her mother and father, all thanks to her visiting tiger. They have supper and Sophie gets ice cream too. In the morning Sophie and her mother go shopping to replace all the food that the greedy tiger ate and they don't forget to buy a LARGE tin of tiger food in case he should ever call again..... "but he never did".

Judith Kerr wrote and illustrated The Tiger Who Came To Tea. If you buy it for your children and like it check out the Mog stories also by her. They're about Mog the cat, there are several of them and they're just as good. Mog and her antics are irresistible. Kerr has that perfect knack of writing in a way that is easy to read aloud. The words are simple, yet strong and rhythmic and the dialogue flows. She makes it marvellously easy for you and wonderfully funny for them. Yes, The Tiger Who Came To Tea is old-fashioned and woefully politically incorrect; it was written thirty years ago. Yes, it is full of anachronisms - who has a milkman these days, let alone a grocer's delivery boy? Whose mother bakes buns for tea? Cafes? Surely it should be Happy Meals under McDonald's Golden Arches (ugh). Daddy saves the day, not Mummy. But it really doesn't matter. It's a fantasy and your children will recognise it as such. And as a fantasy it's timeless. At £4.99 from Amazon, it's a snip. I've just bought a copy for my nephew, aged eighteen months. He loves it. So will any young people of your acquaintance, until they reach school-age at least.