During a series of lectures for passion week, the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, opened up about his mental health. In confessing how he had long relied on antidepressants to “restore me to Eeyore status from something much worse”, he noted how his predecessor, Dr Rowan Williams, once advised him “there is almost no human situation that cannot be explained with the hermeneutical tools of Winnie the Pooh”. Certain psychologists have, in recent years, concurred with this observation, writing academic papers on how the characters in the Hundred Acre Wood are expressions of disorders: Tigger suffers from ADHD, Rabbit is a narcissist, Piglet has an anxiety complex and Pooh displays obsessive compulsive maladies associated with eating honey.
AA Milne himself tended to be dismissive of such readings and certainly would have been amused by the idea of archbishops swapping sermons about his nursery tales. After serving at the Somme, he was not convinced by religion – for all his “hush, hush listen who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers”, he never had his son baptised, unpersuaded that he was born in sin.
Like his creations, Milne put his faith in human difference and inclusive community and was roundly dismissive of the judgmental thou shalt nots of the Bible: “The Old Testament,” he once observed, “is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief – call it what you will – than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.” Tiddley pom.
Live stream
In the early days of the internet, I sat through several evangelical job-threatening presentations that foretold a future in which everyone was a journalist, breaking scoops from their own life, gumshoeing after difficult truth. That is not entirely as Twitter has turned out. What we have all become, however, in the first two decades of social media, is news editors, filtering content, feeding algorithms, to suit our audience of one.
Just occasionally, in that flood of TikTok and tweet, an image or a story cuts through to remind you of the old function of news gathering, as the first rough draft of history. One such moment was the anti-gun protest and vote for expulsion of the “Tennessee Three” from that state’s house of representatives. Witnessing 27-year-old Justin Jones’s subsequent electrifying speech to that house, in his white suit, conjured for me a new image of an old phrase. “The world is watching,” Jones said.
Subconsciously, I’d always associated that idea with people crowded around TV sets. For Jones’s generation, I realised, it creates a different picture: people in cafes and workplaces and bedrooms and trains, united by a new video on their phone screens. And the power of being for once on the same page.
Elf and safety
There are instructive moments when you find your less-generous preconceptions catching up with you. I happened to tune in to the US Masters golf coverage just at the point on Friday night when players were being ushered off the course for rain.
Seeing blazered marshals ordering grown millionaires inside because of a bit of drizzle prompted armchair thoughts of “elf and safety gorn mad”. As the commentary team detailed “very angry-looking clouds”, I came close to the caricature of “scoffing out loud”. It was only when the cameras cut to the sight of 100ft pine trees, uprooted by a mini-tornado, crashing down among spectators, miraculously missing startled souls on deck chairs, that I found myself grudgingly conceding that perhaps the blokes in blazers had a point.
• Tim Adams is an Observer columnist
