Bother - or lack thereof
Nov. 2nd, 2008 08:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
patgundPoohsticks fans club together to save the game
"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."
"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."
