Wet Welsh holidays prompted writing to cherish

Winnie-the-Pooh and Inspector Morse would hardly seem to have much in common, but they both owe their origins to two wet summer holidays at Portmadoc on the edge of Snowdonia in northwest Wales.
In August 1923, Alan Alexander Milne and his friend Nigel Playfair rented a holiday cottage for their families near Portmadoc (now Porthmadog). Incessant rain beat down forcing them to remain indoors, as Milne wrote to a friend, “It rains all day in Wales.” But during this soggy holiday, Milne received proofs of a poem he had written for a children’s magazine, and so he retreated to a summer house at the holiday home to work on the proofreading. But as the rain carried on beating down for days, he used this “heavenly solitude” to write more children’s poems, including one called The Teddy Bear with the opening lines, “A bear, however hard he tries, Grows tubby without exercise.”
Milne collected the verses together and in 1924 they were published as When We Were Young, which became an instant bestseller under the familiar name AA Milne. The verses gave birth to the tubby, honey-loving bear introduced in the poem The Teddy Bear and two years later the bear grew into the “short and stout” character of Winnie-the-Pooh with his circle of friends Eeyore, Piglet, Kanga and Roo, based on the toys of his son Christopher Robin. And although Christopher originally called his bear Edward, he changed the name to Winnie after a visit to London Zoo where he saw a black bear called Winnipeg.
By an extraordinary coincidence, almost exactly 50 years later, in August 1973, the writer Colin Dexter also rented a holiday home near Portmadoc where it too rained endlessly. “I was on holiday and there was nothing to do. It was raining outside, and the children weren’t particularly impressed by the choice of weather. And I sat down at the kitchen table one day and started writing a story,” he told The Moment magazine. That story eventually became the first Inspector Morse novel Last Bus To Woodstock, published in 1975, and Dexter’s first work of fiction.