It was eight o'clock and the children had gone, but they still had to deal with the mess Tigger had made when he bounced over to Piglet shouting that swine flu vaccines had arrived and Piglet took it personally and refused to have it. Now that the press had found out everyone was in uproar over whether it was safe to inject Piglet with anything.

The spreadsheet was Bad News. It seemed from the red histograms that more children than last year couldn't see Pooh when they wanted, what with swine flu and everything, so they had ticked slightly-less-than-absolutely-brilliant-all-things-considered on the satisfaction survey.

Pooh thought this unfair, particularly when all the evidence showed that thanks to him the children had never been so healthy. Owl said Gordon wanted the Bear of their Choice to be available all weekend at no extra cost, not just for emergencies, but just for fun, so they had got ideas. Eeyore said that Polly Clinic the white elephant would see children on Sundays, just because she felt like it, but Pooh said that was because Polly had tons of honey to pay other elephants to work on Sundays, and only a hundred children to look after, while he had more than 2,000 children all to himself and Kanga had taken half his honey away.

Owl sighed and said that he thought Gordon wanted Pooh to be more like the Person who Bore His Name in America, where everyone had all the honey they wanted through Insurance. This puzzled Pooh, as he knew his American cousin spent his life pretending to be him.

Eeyore said he might Go into Politics to Sort it Out, but Owl said Politics was so far away that if Eeyore went there he wouldn't see the wood for the trees. Pooh said this made no sense since you could hardly miss seeing a wood, if you could see a tree - but Owl said the point was that Gordon wasn't interested in outcomes, only in policies, and it was a metaphor. Pooh said that was his point entirely, and Owl agreed, but since they had lost track of what they meant, they gave up and went to bed.

• Catch up with Mary's Road to Revalidation blog