Back to the Hundred Acre Woods

Author AA Milne and his son Christopher Robin both came to resent the Winnie-the-Pooh books. Milne could never get people to take him seriously as an author of fiction for adults, and Christopher Robin got sick of being identified with the child in the stories.

Anthony Burgess also came to dislike his most famous book.

In an alternate universe, maybe they tried really hard to solve each other’s problems…

A Clockwork Pooh #

“What’s it going to be then, eh?”

There was me, that is Christopher Robin, and my three droogs, that is Tigger, Piglet and Pooh, Pooh being a bear of very little brain. We sat in the Hundred Acre Wood making up our rassoodocks what to do with the day. Pooh had suggested it was time for a little something, honey plus something else, peeted with knives to sharpen us up.

Afterwards we scatted out into the big winter nochy and stumped along through the derryevos, then turned towards a thistly mesto, and there we found what we were pretty well looking for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with.

There was a starry gray osyel, his front nogas well apart, gulliver to one side, looking like he was thinking about things.

“Pardon me, brother, and how are you?”

He looked a malenky bit poogly when he viddied the four of us like that, but he said: “Not very how, I don’t seem to have felt at all how for a long time.”

“I’m sorry about that, brother. Let’s have a look at you.”

I took a gooly around and viddied him updown.

“But what is this here? Your vost is missing. You disappoint me, brother, you do really.”

“Oh,” he said, all shaky. “Is it? Oh, let me see.”

He turned slowly round one way them the other, then tried viddying down between his front nogas and past his yarbles, to where the grazzy thing had been.

“An osyel of your age, brother.”

Raising his gulliver, he found himself now like in the middle of a very smiling and polite square. He began to creech: “Somebody must have taken it. How like them.”

“A filthy osyel with no vost, you deserve to be taught a lesson, brother,” I said, “that you do.”

“But,” he tried, “but, but.”

Tigger began bouncing about like the clown he was.

“There’s the mackerel of the cornflake for you,” said Piglet.

We began to filly about with him. Tigger pulled on his ookos, Piglet kicked him lovely in his pot, and we let him go. He went sort of staggering off, it not having been too hard of a tolchock really. We had a snigger at him and then riffled through his thistle bushes, but there wasn’t much in them. There was a red vozdooshy shar there, like from some boorjoyce party, and Pooh stuck it with a nozh and we left the skin on the ground…