Quintin Jardine's blog

I have a pile of books by the side of the bed; must be two feet high at least. Dunno when I’m ever going to find time to read them since I got my Kindle. Things a contemporary author should keep to himself, but . . . one of its great attractions is the opportunity it gives to look back on reading experiences from the past and relive them. You wouldn’t drive in to town to pick up a copy of a blast from the past, but now you can have it by pushing a couple of buttons. As an example, I’m currently revisiting A A Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.

What? QJ, creator of the toughest cop in the  known universe, reading Winnie the ******* Pooh? True, and he’s not ashamed to admit it.

The project sprang from my buying a complete Milne box-set, with the original Shepherd illustrations, not the pallid Disney versions,  for my step-granddaughter Mia, for some future birthday. (They will stay in the box for a while until Senora Banana’s fingers are a little less sticky.) That reminded me of a moment when my own kids were very young, and Irene and I tried to read to them from House at Pooh Corner. Forty years on  they still haven’t figured out why Mum and Dad never got to the end of the story of Pooh-sticks; we couldn’t. The only thing that might have been funnier  that the tale might have been, for a neutral observer, the sight of two adults doubled up with laughter on the floor, while two kids stared at them wondering what the fuss was about. And forty years on, from an adult perspective, the adventures are just as funny. I don’t really have anything against what Disney has done to the Enchanted Forest but none of it has ever really captured the magic of the original.