I raise this, partly because A.A. Milne’s classic is a century old next month, but also because I have spent the past little while observing local events and customs, and I’m minded to inform The Boss that the Hundred Acre Wood in Winnie-The-Pooh was never just a children’s story. It was today’s village square, and the personnel are very much at large.
Take Rabbit. Rabbit is the bloke at the school working bee who arrives with his own schedule on his smartwatch, although the school has not asked for a schedule and the job is mainly shifting mulch. By 8.17am he has divided parents into teams, labelled the wheelbarrows and announced that morning tea will be postponed until “we’ve regained momentum”.
Rabbit has never been placed in charge of anything. He simply detects a gap in authority, slides into it like a ferret into a trouser leg, and looks wounded when somebody asks who elected him.
Owl now lives online, chiefly on Facebook and X, where he reads the headline, ignores the article and types beneath it in capitals with the solemnity of a magistrate sentencing a cabbage. In the old days he could bore to death just a few animals in a tree: technology has now given him the reach of a medium-sized plague.
Tigger is three tables over at the café, filming his poached eggs for Instagram. He addresses the phone in a stage whisper calculated to reach Perth — “LOOK AT THAT YOLK” — while the poor girl accompanying him stares into the middle distance thinking about her future and considers joining a convent.
Tigger has never encountered a social moment he could not turn into content, or a bill he could not somehow be elsewhere for.
Eeyore is on hold to Telstra. He has been there for 47 minutes, listening to a ukulele version of something once written by a human being with hopes of getting service. When the weary call-centre worker finally answers, Eeyore will not become angry. He will merely say, “Ah. There you are,” in the tone of somebody whose worst prophecy has finally received a case number.
Kanga is at the school gate, speaking into an iPhone at arm’s length, broadcasting her child’s medications to the school and to the street, while the child stands beside her, mortified by the giggling of her assembled friends and itching to get away.
And then there is Pooh.
Pooh is the old bloke sitting on the bench seat in the park with no phone visible at all. He is sniffing the blossoms in the air, wanting nothing, bothering nobody and arriving precisely on time to nowhere in particular.
Every single character in this modern circus has a fully charged phone and an urgent opinion. Pooh has none of these, just a jar of honey and an afternoon. In 100 years, who has managed to improve on that portfolio?
I tried explaining this to The Boss while he was tapping out more forgettable material on his laptop, despite having a thinking dog available for consultation.
He told me to lie down.
So I did. Under the jacaranda. It was an excellent meeting. Nothing was decided, nobody was notified, and after a while a bee drifted past, looking as though it knew something about honey.
Pooh would have approved. Woof!
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