Mabble Merlin’s Business Card

Miles and the children were very pleased with their purchases. They had purchased everything they needed in one shop.

Miles decided it was time for some lunch, and he knew the perfect place: a restaurant in Kensington High Street called The Pecan Pie. It was very popular. It sold organic wholefoods and had large wooden tables and a stone floor. Some of the food was on display.

Miles and the children went into the restaurant and sat down at one of the large wooden tables. Miles decided to have chilli con carne with brown rice; Daisy decided to have seafood pizza with prawns, crayfish and pineapple; and Oliver chose pasta twists sprinkled with poppy seeds, with yellowfin tuna, baby sweetcorn, courgettes, mangetout and tomato sauce with basil.

As Miles and Daisy and Oliver waited for their food to arrive, they sipped organic fruit juices. Miles had pineapple, mango and ginger, and the children had strawberry and cherry. They were served with coloured straws, fancy cocktail umbrellas and a slice of lime each. As they drank their organic fruit juices they had another look at the goods they had just bought. Daisy took out the silver charm bracelet. She was wondering what each charm could do. Miles was looking at the silverware.

When the waitress, Emily, arrived, she admired the utterly beautiful charm bracelet and asked where they had purchased it.

Miles piped up that it was a small shop just down the side street with a billboard on view.

Emily said she had been along that street many times, but had never ever seen that shop. She said she thought it must have just opened. She told them she was thinking of buying a necklace to replace her favourite one, which she had recently lost.

Meanwhile, as if by magic or telepathy, Mabble Merlin popped out of the shop and on the billboard on the cobblestones he chalked the words ‘Silver gemstone necklaces - choose from rose quartz, amethyst, blue lace agate, clear quartz, moonstone, jasper, aventurine and obsidian’. He seemed to know that Emily was going to pop into the shop.

When Emily finished work she easily found the shop down the side street, and she bought a heart-shaped rose-quartz silver necklace. From then on she wore the necklace every day, and the customers in The Pecan Pie often commented on how beautiful it was, but none of the customers ever found the shop - and, curiously enough, Emily never saw the shop again. She thought it was very strange that the shop was suddenly there and suddenly gone.

The Musty Old Magical Curiosity Shop could make itself invisible if it wanted to. The owl in the shop window, Hoot-Hoot, sometimes stared into a would-be customer’s eyes, and if he didn’t think that person was ready to buy anything magical from the shop, he would make the would-be customer feel so, so, so sleepy. Some of these would-be customers went straight home without buying any of the things they went into town for, and all they could remember was seeing an owl in a shop window. Sometimes would-be customers went into the shop and the owl handed them a business card and then hypnotised them with his large owl eyes to go home and put their feet up. Hours later the would-be customers would wake up at home holding a business card which read: ‘You have had an encounter with the Musty Old Magical Curiosity Shop. Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Proprietor: Mabble Merlin, at your service.’ The card was purple with silver writing and a few strange symbols, which looked like very ancient magic symbols. The people would look at the card for a long time wondering where on earth the Musty Old Magical Curiosity Shop actually was. They often waited eagerly for the call, but for many of them the call never came.