As an escape from all the bad news happening around the world—namely, global wars, climate change disasters, and the affordability crisis—I recently decided to revisit A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, a childhood book I remember with particular fondness. My godfather gave me a beautiful hardcover edition, with E. H. Shepard’s wonderful colour illustrations, for my seventh birthday, in 1967. I could read by this time, but my younger brother and sister couldn’t. So my dad read it aloud to us at bedtime, sitting in an armchair while the three of us lay on my sister’s bed. Being a fun and imaginative man, my father used different voices for each of the seven anthropomorphic animals and Christopher Robin, bringing the book to life.
My favourite characters were the good-natured, honey-loving Pooh and the wryly melancholic old grey donkey, Eeyore. So the chapter I loved the most was Chapter Six, “In Which Eeyore Has a Birthday and Gets Two Presents,” as these two figure prominently in it. Another reason I liked this one so much is that when Eeyore tells Pooh it’s his birthday, he says, “Many happy returns of the day,” which is how my father always greeted me. (My birthday was the happiest day of the year, other than Christmas. Like many privileged young children, I received several gifts from my parents then, and I looked forward to getting even more from my school friends at my birthday party.)