Percy Bear on Poohsticks Bridge
Holidays are holy days, a rest from the workaday work of making ourselves. A chance to let new water flood the tidal pool.
A place casts its spell, we get itchy feet, or even before that: departure without destination — the joy of pure going. ‘But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go,‘ the Beatles sang:
“Where are we going?” said Pooh, hurrying after him, and wondering whether it was to be an Explore or a What-shall-I-do-about-you-know-what.
“Nowhere,” said Christopher Robin.
So they began going there . . .
Ashdown Forest, 30 miles south of London. This was the setting for A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. You can walk, look about, smell the heather, picnic, or pick up fir cones— right inside the pages of Winnie-the-Pooh: “Pooh’s forest and Ashdown Forest are identical,” a grownup Christopher Robin once said.
In Posingford Wood, close to Cotchford Farm, the Milnes’ country home, you can play Poohsticks on the ‘wooden bridge, almost as broad as a road, with wooden rails on each side of it’ that crosses a lazy offshoot of the River Medway. Here was the place Pooh invented Poohsticks. You can visit Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place, and dream with your back against a treetrunk in the ‘enchanted place on the very top of the Forest called Galleons Lap, which is sixty-something trees in a circle; and Christopher Robin knew that it was enchanted because nobody had ever been able to count whether it was sixty-three or sixty-four, not even when he tied a piece of string round each tree after he had counted it . . . Sitting there they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them in Galleons Lap.’
Once, on the way to Gatwick Airport for a flight to Venice, we stopped by to play Poohsticks on Poohsticks Bridge. It was a lovely English morning and a long walk down from the car. A long run back up to the car as well. So, yep. We missed the flight by 3 minutes, and got bounced. Good old British Airways. But they couldn’t take away from us the best excuse ever for missing a plane.
Too shy to knock
An Enchanted Place
