Column – Did you know that Winnie the Pooh really existed? Or yes, he still really exists. I saw the doll a year ago in the New York City Library, together with the other toy animals of Christopher Robin (Janneman Robinson in the Dutch version).* Christopher Robin is the only child of the writer of the Pooh stories, AA Milne.
What I never knew is that Christopher Robin suffered greatly
from his parents’ marketing approach throughout his life. I’ll explain how later. He even accused his father of using the time they spent playing together in their ” hundred acre wood ” as a form of market research for the first Winnie the Pooh book.
How do I know? I recently walked through the Hundred Acre Wood during my holiday and after returning home I started to delve into the real story of Christopher Robin. As true Anglophiles, we had been to England as a family before, but I was annoyed that I had never been to the forest (south of London). Because we would have to drive for phone number library hours from Bath to the tunnel at Dover on the last day of our holiday, I wanted to take a walk through the Hundred Acre Wood as a stopover. The forest that had been such an important part of Christopher Robin’s life.
If you are ever in the area: you can park at the Pooh Ca
r Park (yes) and walk from there to the Pooh Sticks Bridge. You may know this bridge from the Disney films: it appears there as the bridge from which Pooh threw sticks into the water. At the real bridge, the real Christopher Robin also threw these sticks, apparently, and children still do that. Along the road to the ‘Pooh Sticks Bridge’ you can even see the houses of the other animals, such as a door of Owl at the top of the tree. I later understood that the real Christopher Robin himself had also hung such a door in a tree (I suspect a different door). So Comerç electrònic ucraïnès 2023: estadístiques i tendències del mercat the story is very close to reality, much closer than I thought. But also much closer than Christopher Robin had hoped.
The inspiration for the book came from the bw lists games that his father Alan Alexander (called ‘Blue’ by his son) played with his son in the forest, together with the toy animals. Apparently, this was not common in the ‘upper class’ at that time (between the 1st and 2nd world war): children played with nannies and if necessary with their mother. Because by chance the nanny and the mother were both away for a few days, Alan Alexander decided to get to know his child better and explore the forest with him. As a writer of plays, this had such an inspiring effect on him that he decided to write a child.
