After the Anschluss,
things were getting sticky;

Pooh’s ever-growing demands
for autobahns and honey
increased the daily pressures
on your average bear,

His hand-painted soldiers
requisitioned all the Lego;
Meccano became a thing of the past
and we queued hours for Sticklebricks and Playdoh

It got so tight you couldn’t see
the wood for the trees,
or the honey for the bees,
as Pooh liked to say,

Sooty, the intellectuals said,
is just a media puppet
And they were the first to disappear
when Pooh banned Disney
and closed the universities down

Big Ted had had a much more laissez-faire approach,
until he fetched up in Rio
with an ice-pick in his back

Paddington, meanwhile,
was rumoured to be lying low,
also in South America,
where a taste for marmalade was not regarded yet
as a crime on a par with membership
of the Hanna-Barbera Gang.

Even Sooty was treading a fine line,
with some in the Party calling his
political correctness into question
in the light of his relationship with Matthew Corbett.

But what had really got everyone’s goat
was the way Larry the Lamb
had worked his way in with Pooh
and was now to be heard pontificating
on the racial impurities of pandas
and the need for an independent Ursine homeland,

That was where I came in;
I was writing op-eds for the Blue Peter Annual,
and political speeches for Rupert
(who was a close personal friend).

That placed us both in the frame;
You’d better go in disguise, he said,
Pooh’s got something up his sleeve,
and it’s not just a funny salute.