# books / Little Dribbling - Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson could travel round Tesco and the resulting book would be hilarious & insightful.

I’ve enjoyed Neither Here nor There, Down Under, A Walk in the Woods, Notes from a Small Island and now Little Dribbling.

More than anything else, I am inspired to travel my own country, explore its countryside.

Simply funny

On getting a British passport…

The first, the trickier but paradoxically much the more common method, was to find your way into a British womb and wait for nine months.

Eastleigh is a satellite of Southampton and appears to have been bombed heavily during the Second World War, though perhaps not quite heavily enough

spotted a space in a layby and darted into it with an abrupt and daring manoeuvre that prompted six or eight other cars to honk their horns and flash their lights in a spontaneous gesture of admiration.

At the Casse-Croûte Deli, the special of the day was Brie and asparagus tart made with organic cider, which I was pleased and relieved to see. How often have I had to decline a Brie and asparagus tart because the cider wasn’t organic.

Among the genetic gifts the Neanderthals passed on to us, it seems, is ginger hair, bless them.

Comparing honours in UK vs US…

You don’t add something to your name, as in Britain, but rather add your name to something. The warm glow of unwarranted prestige is just the same in both cases. The difference is that in America the system produces a hospital wing; in Britain, you just get a knobhead in ermine.

meaningful information or provided real entertainment. The rooms were small and airless and cramped. To make matters worse, somebody in our group was making the most dreadful silent farts. Fortunately, it was me, so I wasn’t nearly as bothered as the others.

I have on occasion been astonished to discover in our house that if you dig through piles of cushions and blankets you sometimes find a sofa or bed underneath.

I was also rather taken with a hairdresser’s called Curl Up and Dye.

I passed the famous Moorcock Inn (or Nymphomaniac’s Plea, as I always think it),

TIL

George Everest, incidentally, didn’t pronounce his name Ev-er-rest, as everyone says it today, but as Eve-rest – just two syllables – so that the mountain is not only misnamed but mispronounced.

Britain is incontestably substantial. Amazingly, it is the thirteenth largest land mass on the planet and that includes four continents – Australia, Antarctica, America and Eurasia-Africa (which geographers, being anally retentive and unimaginative, classify as a single mass). Only eight islands on Earth are bigger: Greenland, New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar, Baffin, Sumatra, Honshu and Victoria. By population, Britain is the fourth largest island state, behind only Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines. By wealth, it is second.

In 971 Swithun’s remaining bones were moved from one spot to another within Winchester Cathedral, and this coincided with a mighty storm. The date, 15 July, became known as St Swithun’s Day, and spawned a legend commemorated in verse:

St Swithun’s Day if thou dost rain,
For forty days it will remain.
St Swithun’s Day, if thou be fair,
For forty days ’twill rain nae mair.

When Jane Austen left the house, in the summer of 1817, it was to go to Winchester, sixteen miles to the west, to die. She was only forty-one, and the cause of her death is unknown. It may have been Addison’s disease or Hodgkin’s lymphoma or a form of typhus or possibly arsenic poisoning,

arsenic was routinely used in making wallpapers and for colouring fabrics. It has been suggested that the general air of ennui and frailty that seemed so characteristic of the age may simply have been generations of women spending too much time indoors taking in gently toxic vapours.

the A roads emanating from London. So you start at the top with the A1 (London to Edinburgh), then move in a clockwise fashion to the A2 (London to Dover), A3 (London to Portsmouth), and so on all the way round to the A6 (London to Carlisle). These six roads divide the country into wedge-shaped sectors (think of England as a badly made pizza). In principle, all the roads in each wedge are assigned the same initial digit, so that, for instance, the A11 and B1065 are both in sector 1 (i.e. between the A1 and A2), while the A30, A327 and B3006 are all in sector 3.

Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry made a study of national inventiveness and concluded that in the modern era Britain had produced 55 per cent of all the world’s ‘significant inventions’, against 22 per cent for America and 6 per cent for Japan.

Discussing Stonehenge…

Something about this site drew people long before anyone decided to erect stones there. People came from all over – from continental Europe and the Highlands of Scotland – but for what purposes precisely will probably never be known. Nothing of course is more mysterious than the great stone circle itself.

statistically a Briton is more likely to die by almost any other means – including accidentally walking into a wall – than to be murdered.

Quakers in the Darbys’ day were a bullied and downtrodden minority. Excluded from conventional pursuits like politics and academia, they became big in industry and commerce, particularly, for some reason, in banking and the manufacture of chocolate. The Barclays and Lloyds banking families and the Cadburys, Frys and Rowntrees of chocolate renown were all Quakers. They and many others made Britain a more dynamic and wealthy place entirely as a consequence of being treated shabbily by it. It had never occurred to me to be unkind to a Quaker, but if that’s what it takes to get the country back on its feet again, I am prepared to consider it.

It is interesting to think that Britain’s greatness was built on a product, cotton, that Britain couldn’t grow and that came from the one part of the empire it had lost and didn’t control.

Everton’s ground is Goodison Park, which is not merely the most venerable stadium in English football, but in the world. It was built in 1892 and is evidently the oldest surviving purpose-built football ground anywhere.

perhaps the most historic stretch of railway on the planet, where the very first passenger trains ever ran, on thirty-three miles of track linking Liverpool with Manchester.

the Lake District gets four times as many visitors as Yellowstone National Park in America in an area just a quarter the size. On the busiest days, a quarter of a million people pour in. And yet it handles it remarkably well, on the whole.

In Iowa, my own state, Grinnell, an eminently respectable liberal arts college but one that not many people outside the Midwest have ever heard of, has 1,680 students and an endowment of $1.5 billion – or more than all British universities put together apart from Oxford and Cambridge. Altogether eighty-one universities in America have endowments of $1 billion or more…Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team…despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world’s top ten universities and 11 of the top 100. Put another way, Britain has 1 per cent of the world’s population, but 11 per cent of its best universities, and accounts for nearly 12 per cent of total academic citations and 16 per cent of the most highly cited studies.

Inspiring Britain

Nothing – and I mean, really, absolutely nothing – is more extraordinary in Britain than the beauty of the countryside.

England and Wales have 130,000 miles of public footpaths, about 2.2 miles of path for every square mile of area. People in Britain don’t realize how extraordinary that is.

It is a testament to the British nation that more than seventy years after Newbould painted this expansive prospect, it is as fine now as it was then.

The one charge against the green belt that has some foundation is that it keeps a lot of land off the market. Yes, it does. That is actually the idea of it. But that land isn’t sitting there doing nothing. It shelters wildlife, transpires oxygen, sequesters carbon and pollutants, grows food, provides quiet lanes for cycling and footpaths for walking, adds grace and tranquillity to the landscape. It is already under enormous pressure.

Silbury Hill is a wonder. It is 130 feet high – about the height of a ten-storey building – and is entirely made by hand. It is the tallest artificial prehistoric mound in the world.

Altogether, ninety people from Cambridge have won Nobel Prizes, more than any other institution in the world

Britain is packed so solid with good stuff – with castles, stately homes, hill forts, stone circles, medieval churches, giant figures carved in hillsides, you name it – that a good deal of it gets lost. It is a permanent astonishment to me how casually strewn with glory Britain is. If the Derwent dam were in Iowa, it would be on the state’s licence plates. There would be campgrounds, an RV park, probably an outlet centre. Here it is anonymous and forgotten, a momentary diversion on a countryside amble.

I do vividly recall once looking down on Derwent Water from the side of Skiddaw and thinking that heaven really must look like this.

Go to the Forest of Bowland or Eden Valley and you can have it pretty much to yourself. The Lune Valley is as fine as anything in the Lakes

You see what I am saying. Britain is infinite. There isn’t anywhere in the world with more to look at in a smaller space – nowhere that has a greater record of interesting and worthwhile productivity over a longer period at a higher level. No wonder my trip didn’t feel complete. I could never see it all.

what really sets the British apart is that when things go very wrong and they have a legitimate reason to bitch deeply, bitterly and at length, that is when they are the happiest of all. A Briton standing in a minefield with a leg blown off who can say, ‘I told you this would happen,’ is actually a happy man. I quite like that in a people.

White Horse of Uffington. This is a giant stylized chalk figure of a horse, nearly four hundred feet long, carved into a hillside in Oxfordshire. It is strikingly modern – it looks like it was designed by Picasso – and very beautiful. It stands just beneath the even more ancient track known as the Ridgeway.

there isn’t a landscape in the world that is more artfully worked, more lovely to behold, more comfortable to be in, than the countryside of Great Britain. It is the world’s largest park, its most perfect accidental garden. I think it may be the British nation’s most glorious achievement. All we have to do is look after it. I hope that’s not too much to ask.

Britain under repair

The sad irony is that the things that make the landscape of Britain comely and distinctive are almost entirely no longer needed. Hedgerows, country churches, stone barns, verges full of nodding wildflowers and birdsong, sheep roaming over windswept fells, village shops and post offices and much more can only rarely now be justified on economic grounds, and for most people in power those are the only grounds that matter.

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself.

The tragedy for so many councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right.

The arithmetic of the British countryside is simple and compelling. Britain has about 60 million acres of land and about 60 million people – one acre for each person. Every time you give up ten acres of greenfield site to build a superstore, in effect ten people lose their acres. By developing countryside you force more and more people to share less and less space. Trying to limit that growth isn’t nimbyism, it’s common sense.

If you have a lot of good old stuff and you want to keep it, you have to pay for it. If you don’t pay for it, you can’t keep it. I believe I have just described modern Britain.

obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to stop trying to be a powerhouse and instead concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transport, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies.

Misc

to think that if that bomb had fallen a hundred yards to either side or where the Germans had intended it to go, then my wife would never have existed and I wouldn’t be in Wraysbury now. It further occurred to me that every bomb that fell in the war, on both sides of the Channel, must have changed lives in that way.