Notes from a Small Island

by Bill Bryson

“Is it raining out?” the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. “No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.” “Oh, yes?” she went on in a manner that made me suspect she was not attending my words closely.

you took out all that plate glass and made the ground floors of the buildings look as if they belonged to the floors above, we might not be able to see right into every Sketchley’s dry cleaner and Leeds Permanent Building Society and Boots the Chemist, and what a sad loss that would be. Imagine passing a Sketchley’s and not being able to see racks of garments in plastic bags and an assortment of battered carpet shampooers and a lady at the counter idly cleaning her teeth with a paper clip, and think how dreary life would be. Why, it’s unthinkable.

Lol

that tireless, dogged optimism of theirs that allowed them to attach an upbeat turn of phrase to the direst inadequacies—“Mustn’t grumble,” “It makes a change,” “You could do worse,” “It’s not much, but it’s cheap and cheerful,” “Well, it was quite nice”—but gradually I came around to their way of thinking and my life has never been happier.

Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, “Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!” Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was

one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.

This is, after all, merely the most important prehistoric monument in Europe and one of the dozen most-visited tourist attractions in England, so clearly there is no point in spending foolish sums making it interesting and instructive.

I hoisted my pack, picked up my room key, and gave her a man-of-the-world wink that would, I fancy, have made her swoon had I been but twenty years younger and considerably better looking, and not had a large dab of cowshit on the end of my nose.

they didn’t like these books at all because the characters in them never did anything more lively than visit a pet shop or watch a fisherman paint his boat. I tried to explain that this was sound preparation for life in Britain,

The Ashmolean, for instance. What a wonderful institution, the oldest public museum on Planet Earth and certainly one of the finest.

Good museum

you can be among laughing, lively young people and lose yourself in reveries of what it was like when you, too, had energy and a flat stomach and thought of sex as something more than a welcome chance to lie down for a while.

Good Oxford points

I always make a point to turn around in such driveways, whether I need to or not, and I urge you to join me in this practice if the opportunity presents itself. It is always a good idea to toot your horn two or three times to make sure that the owner sees you.

It isn’t every day after all that the British aristocracy produce someone of W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck’s rare and extraordinary mental loopiness, though in fairness it must be said they give it their best shot.

the Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre. The name is a bit rich because the developers built it on top of Victoria Gardens, so it really ought to be called the Nice Little Public Gardens Destroyed by This Shopping Centre.

For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women, and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest—I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People—but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

it occurred to me now, as I sat in the immense conviviality of Granada’s mock House of Commons debate, that not once at Disneyland had there been a single laugh. Wit, and particularly the dry, ironic, understated sort of wit in which the British specialize, was completely beyond Disney’s wholesome and drearily serious Imagineers, as I believe they are unfortunately known.

Where I came from, soap operas were always about rich, ruthless, enormously successful people with $1,500 suits and offices high up in angular skyscrapers, and the main characters were always played by the sort of actors and actresses who, given a choice between being able to act and having really great hair, would always go for the hair.

appalling stories of deprivation—you know the kind of thing: father killed in a factory accident, thirty-seven brothers and sisters, nothing for tea but lichen broth and a piece of roofing slate, except on Sundays when they might trade in a child for a penny’s worth of rotten parsnips,

Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add ice cream wrappers, empty cigarette boxes, and plastic carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape. They fluttered gaily in the bushes and brought color and texture to pavements and gutters. And to think that elsewhere we stick these objects in trashbags.

It was an odd experience watching people who existed in a recognizably British milieu—they drank tea and wore Marks & Spencer cardigans—but talked in Martian.

a couple of places that styled themselves “family butchers” (I always want to go in and say, “How much to do mine?”),

a weather forecast from the Western Daily Mail and it says, in toto, “Outlook: Dry and warm, but cooler with some rain.”

One fellow was even wearing shorts—always a sign of advanced dementia in a British walker. Walking—walking,

John and his chums toyed with my will to live in the cruelest possible way; seeing me falling behind, they would lounge around on boulders, smoking and chatting and resting, but the instant I caught up with them with a view to falling at their feet, they would bound up refreshed and, with a few encouraging words, set off anew with large, manly strides, so that I had to stumble after and never got a rest.

Imagine sharing this space with sixteen hundred other similarly dashing craft, most of them in the control of some potbellied urban halfwit with next to no experience of powered craft, plus all the floating jetsam of rowboats, kayaks, and the like, and it is a wonder that there aren’t bodies all over the water.

reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world—kilts, bagpipes, tam-o’-shanters, tins of oatcakes, bright yellow sweaters with big diamond patterns, sacks of haggis—and how little anyone but a Scot would want them.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, how you can give a couple of old people a canvas holdall, an assortment of Tupperware containers, and a thermos flask and they can amuse themselves for hours.

“Sparkling . . . memorable . . . a singular and engaging travel book . . . Readers should be charmed, amused and enlightened.” —Arizona Daily Star