Hard to bear in movie recast
THROUGHOUT my life I feel as if I’ve been haunted by Winnie- the- Pooh and his young friend Christopher Robin.
When I was in my scholarship year in a oneteacher school, the headmaster decided one size fits all and inflicted weeks of readings from A. A. Milne’s book on the whole school, grades one through to eight. In the words of Queen Victoria, I was not amused.
I could feel no empathy for a stupid, lazy toy bear with a honey fixation.
A decade later I was introduced to the catchy tunes and clever lyrics of Walt Disney, who still own the trademark for the Bear of Very Little Brain.
When I was in a throng of American tourists peering through some very tall wrought iron gates in London, I could not get one of the lyrics out of my head, “They’re changing guards at Buckingham Palace – Christopher Robin went down with Alice”.
When I developed a middleaged spread, I decided the lyric of Winnie- the- Pooh’s expanding waistline were no longer amusing. Mind over matter never made me un- fatter.
By the time I got around to transferring the song from an old LP to a CD for a young friend I no longer took it personally. The Canadian black bear from Winnipeg now had a movie of its own A Bear Named Winnie. The stuffed toy bear of Christopher Robin was his mother’s present from Harrods for his first birthday.
Goodbye Christopher Robin is now in Townsville cinemas and has a reel cast which are about 100 years older than the real cast. As a lapsed Anglican I can identify with Milne’s 1923 poem Vespers made famous by Gracie Fields with its “Hush! Whisper who dares/ Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”.
What I found a little more disturbing was his father as a victim of shell- shock, as I have witnessed first- hand the symptoms of PTSD.
The 2018 movie Christopher Robin will portray the titular character as a grown man. Let’s hope I don’t find it quite so dark. WILLIAM ROSS,
Cranbrook.