INSULT TO POOH - WHAT ON EARTH IS THIS SIMPERING THING?

Pooh forms a part of an English tradition dating back to the first half of the last century, which has given joy and comfort to generations of children. The stories are, of course, played out against an implied background of solid middle-class status, which may irritate the sociologically twitchy, but I cannot remember that I ever felt excluded from this unattainable world of nannies, and doctors who came at a call, wearing a bed-side manner and pin-stripe trousers, any more than I felt degraded by reading of the exploits of the toffs at Greyfriars.

The basic reason for this, I think, is that Pooh lived in a real world of his own, very like a child's world, in which life is often happy and contented, but where inexplicable events can sometimes impinge, frightening visions appear, and where one is often aware of incomprehension and of sad mistakes being made. Experience gradually fills in the gaps. All this is mirrored in the constantly shifting images of Pooh in a variety of moods, yet always at heart a well-worn stuffed bear, which appear in the original illustrations by E.H.Shepard. In the illustration above, for example, he is having difficulty working out which of them is in the other's house.

I find it very sad to contemplate the enfeebling of all this by the flabby hands of Disney. This plasticated fantasy-factory markets a sanitised fluffy toy, his features wreathed in an inane grin, who goes through life having lots of fun in a pinky landscape, surrounded by grotesque distortions of Piglet, Tigger, Owl, Rabbit's-friends-and-relations, and the rest. The wit of the dual relation of the narrator with the child listening and the adult reading aloud seems to be ignored. And what will a child learn from this pap? Nothing but that life ought to be a round of easy play - a lesson that is very hard to unlearn in the real world. Perhaps that is why some adolescents go about with expressions suggesting resentment at having to exist at all.