Poohsticks, nothing but poohsticks

Something that has absolutely nothing to do with anything, yet is good news all the same.

 

 

Poohsticks fans club together to save the game

Group steps in to rescue the world championship

• Caroline Davies
• The Observer,
• Sunday November 2 2008

Competitors at the 2008 World Poohsticks Championships at Day's Lock, near Dorchester-on-Thames. Photograph: Geoffrey Swaine/Rex Features

Ever since Pooh tripped, lost grip of his fir cone on the bridge at the edge of the Forest and accidentally invented a game, poohsticks has been beloved by both young and old.
Eighty years on, this quintessentially British endeavour, in which participants drop sticks into a river from one side of a bridge to see whose emerges first on the other, attracts worldwide attention.
And no event has done more to export its simple charm than the annual World Poohsticks Championships, held on the Thames in Oxfordshire for the past quarter century.
So there was no little alarm among poohsticks fans when the Wallingford-based Rotary Club of Sinodun, which has loyally kept the championships going for the past 20 years, called time. The 2008 championships, held in March, were to be its last. The reason: its elderly members - average age approaching 70 - felt that they could no longer cope with the physical demands of organising an event which regularly attracts up to 3,000 as well as TV crews from Japan, Russia, Australia and beyond.
The fear was that the championships, held in honour of the game invented by Winnie-the-Pooh creator AA Milne for his son, Christopher Robin, would die out. But a new group of volunteers, the Oxford Spires Rotary Club - average age under 40 - is to step into the breach.
'It just cannot be lost. It is a much loved event locally, and it is known worldwide as one of those slightly quirky, fun, English things,' said Liz Williamson, 33, president of Oxford Spires, who admits to spending her hen party playing poohsticks on the original AA Milne bridge in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. 'Once these things are lost, it is ever so hard to bring them back again,' added Williamson, a GP and mother of a nine-month-old daughter who already has 'a shelf full of Winnie-the-Pooh things'.
The World Poohsticks Championships were started by Lynn David, lockkeeper at Day's Lock near Dorchester-on-Thames. A keen gardener, he noticed walkers were breaking off twigs from his hedges to play on the nearby bridges and hit on the idea of leaving a supply of sticks next to a collection box to raise funds for the RNLI lifeboat charity. When he retired, the Sinodun Rotary Club continued the fundraising.
'The trouble is there is a lot of heavy work staging the event,' said David Caswell, president of the Sinodun club. 'There is the bringing in and erecting of tents, and the equipment for food, and erecting safety fences all around the island. Some of our members are over 70, and it was just getting too much. We feared it could die out. We hoped somebody would step in. So we are just relieved and delighted that the Oxford Spires have agreed to take it over.'
Competing for medals - and a small Pooh bear - contestants play in individual or team heats, with the winners going forward to further heats, and then a final.
Some winners, like the Czech team which won in 2004, claim skill over luck, attributing their success to choosing the fastest part of the river. Certainly Eeyore believed technique was involved and was keen to dispense advice to Tigger about letting the stick drop 'in a twitchy sort of way'.
And poohsticks, which has featured on the BBC sitcom To The Manor Born, the 1998 film Into My Heart and on a recent M&S clothes advertisement, as well as appearing as a question on the TV quiz University Challenge, can be very exciting, attests Caswell. 'You get people - I know it sounds silly and if you haven't seen it you wouldn't believe it - but people are jumping up and down and getting excited as sticks are overtaking each other. I'm not terribly convinced there is a technique, though' he added. 'We've never had a repeat winner.'
Now he hopes the championships' future is secured for many years to come, 'not just to give families here at home the pleasure of a good day out, but also because of the interest from overseas visitors.
'One of the best things I've heard was a TV interview given by one American tourist who said it was the highlight of his visit to Britain, because it was what he had heard about the British and their zany sense of humour. And he said: "We couldn't run this event in the States, you know, because they just wouldn't understand it."'