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An Expotition
Aug. 12th, 2021 12:59 pmWhen I was last in Tokyo I went to a Winnie-the-Pooh exhibition that had recently transferred from the V&A. There, I photographed a reproduction of the Pooh Sticks bridge, or プーさんの棒投げ橋 (Pooh's-stick-throwing-bridge) as they call it thereabouts. As I wrote at the time, I hadn't realised that W-t-P was big in Japan, although I'd known that Miho, my friend from Tokyo Joshidai, was wont to take groups of students to the Ashdown Forest.
I'd never been there myself, though, until the other day. It turns out that Ashdown was on Ayako's literary to-do list, and so we set off to Sussex, picking up Haruka (who had a day off from her London job) at East Grinstead station en route. It had been raining hard for several days, but we were hoping that we'd get lucky, and so we did, overall, although we couldn't do much about the resulting mud.
Anyway, here is the Pooh Corner tea room in Hartfield, where we visited a small Pooh museum. We called there first, hoping to get a map showing the locations of the various places in the Hundred Aker Wood, but they'd run out of information sheets in English. All they had, instead, was a large pile in Japanese! Thanks to COVID, Japanese tourists have disappeared from the scene, if we exclude our own party and the Anglo-Japanese family that happened to be there at the same time - hence the surplus, which was lucky for us, of course. We found throughout the visit that signs were in English and Japanese (but no other languages), much as is the case in parts of the Cotswolds.
Anyway, after various adventures executed in the medium of mud, we won through to the Pooh Sticks bridge, and of course had a game with sticks collected on the way. Unfortunately, the river was in spate and churned up from the recent rain, which made Pooh-sticks a less leisurely affair than I'd been anticipating and more like white-water-rafting for twigs. I got my photo taken with my mother's well-thumbed 1934 copy of The House at Pooh Corner.
That was followed up with a nice cream tea from a Tigger teapot, back at Pooh Corner.
And now I feel I have Pooh under my belt.
I'd never been there myself, though, until the other day. It turns out that Ashdown was on Ayako's literary to-do list, and so we set off to Sussex, picking up Haruka (who had a day off from her London job) at East Grinstead station en route. It had been raining hard for several days, but we were hoping that we'd get lucky, and so we did, overall, although we couldn't do much about the resulting mud.
Anyway, here is the Pooh Corner tea room in Hartfield, where we visited a small Pooh museum. We called there first, hoping to get a map showing the locations of the various places in the Hundred Aker Wood, but they'd run out of information sheets in English. All they had, instead, was a large pile in Japanese! Thanks to COVID, Japanese tourists have disappeared from the scene, if we exclude our own party and the Anglo-Japanese family that happened to be there at the same time - hence the surplus, which was lucky for us, of course. We found throughout the visit that signs were in English and Japanese (but no other languages), much as is the case in parts of the Cotswolds.
Anyway, after various adventures executed in the medium of mud, we won through to the Pooh Sticks bridge, and of course had a game with sticks collected on the way. Unfortunately, the river was in spate and churned up from the recent rain, which made Pooh-sticks a less leisurely affair than I'd been anticipating and more like white-water-rafting for twigs. I got my photo taken with my mother's well-thumbed 1934 copy of The House at Pooh Corner.
That was followed up with a nice cream tea from a Tigger teapot, back at Pooh Corner.
And now I feel I have Pooh under my belt.