Notes from a Small Island

by Bill Bryson

I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me.

I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.

I didn’t know anything really, which is a strangely wonderful position to be in. Everything that lay before me was new and mysterious and exciting in a way you can’t imagine.

I was positively radiant with ignorance.

One of the charms of the British is that they have so little idea of their own virtues, and nowhere is this more true than with their happiness.

And the British are so easy to please. It is the most extraordinary thing. They actually like their pleasures small. That is why so many of their treats—tea cakes, scones, crumpets, rock cakes, rich tea biscuits, fruit Shrewsburys—are so cautiously flavorful. They are the only people in the world who think of jam and currants as thrilling constituents of a pudding or cake. Offer them something genuinely tempting—a slice of gateau or a choice of chocolates from a box—and they will nearly always hesitate and begin to worry that it’s unwarranted and excessive, as if any pleasure beyond a very modest threshold is vaguely unseemly.

To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright. You might as well say “Oh, I shouldn’t really” if someone tells you to take a deep breath.

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.

Sand stays with you longer than many contagious diseases.

The rain eased off and turned into an insidious drizzle—that special English kind of drizzle that hangs in the air and saps the spirit.

The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.

Here are instructions for being a pigeon: (1) Walk around aimlessly for a while, pecking at cigarette butts and other inappropriate items. (2) Take fright at someone walking along the platform and fly off to a girder. (3) Have a shit. (4) Repeat.

It is one thing to see these things in museums, quite another to come upon one on the spot where it was laid. I

Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly. They put milk in their tea, drive on the wrong side of the road, pronounce Cholmondeley as “Chumley” and Belvoir as “Beaver,” celebrate the Queen’s birthday in June even though she was born in April, and dress their palace guards in bearskin helmets that make them look as if, for some private and unfathomable reason, they are wearing fur-lined wastebaskets on their heads.

When the Duke died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floorless. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.