Tuesday 24 February 2009

Oh, Pooh...

I've been thinking lately that this little archive of practice rants and digitised scribblings needs to change dramatically from now on in light of the highly unlikely, but nonetheless disconcerting possibility that there's anyone out there actually bored enough to actually read any of it. If you are indeed out there and not, in fact, a fevered figment of my imagination then I salute you. For your patience and, of course, for your muffled giggles. Because let's face it, if you are out there, you deserve better.

And as you, this possibly fictional reader will no doubt have noticed in some perhaps Schrödingerean assessment, too many of these articles resemble essays and suffer greatly from a very academic tone. This, of course, makes me very popular with examiners but just doesn't cut the proverbial mustard in the world of witty, on-the-pulse column journalism. They are also few and far-between if I were, for a moment, to be extraordinarily understating. There's simply no rhythm to them. No voom to their vocabulary, no rich sensory soliloquies with off-the-cuff and serendipitous similes.

Okay that's a bit much, but you get the gist. Of course, recent reading of Boris Johnson's hack compendium Lend Me Your Ears has influenced this seemingly sudden revelation, but then so has your author's simultaneous delve into the Complete Collection of A. A. Milne's one and only Winnie-the-Pooh...

Yes, it's true. It's taken not one but two blond, honey-craven and slightly overweight ursidæ to bring home the bitter fruits of my neglect of English literature over the last few years. Don't judge me too harshly. Peering meekly over an enormous in-tray of academic textbooks and historiographical tomes your plucky narrator felt he had no other recourse than to tell prose 'to bollocks' in the face of such an apparently superior truckload of factual and utilitarian knowledge.

Well no more I say! This blog shall be fluid, it shall be frequently updated and what's more it shall be readable & read! It shall also, for some reason, vaguely resemble Fisher Price packaging in its appearance. Perhaps the sharp, restrained lines and points of Times New Roman were too indicative of the old blog's failings for your author to merit retention and are, in any case, clearly not as groovey as a font once used by Pulp...

I shall leave you then with my, to date, most favourite passage of Pooh by that Wodehosian giant of children's literature, A. A. Milne. It comprises, funnily enough, the very first words of the very first stanza of the very first volume of the very first Pooh, first published (for the very first time) way back in 1926.

Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn't. Anyhow, here he is at the bottom, and ready to be introduced to you. Winnie-the-Pooh.

Keep that dream alive Pooh.

1 comments:

Barnsley Nationalist said...
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