Interview: Bill Bryson

Walking, what’s next, and why the author of our best-loved travel book is never leaving Blighty,

H ow’s the walking going? At 67, my legs are the last part of me that is working and to my amazement, I can still walk a fair bit! My wife and I just recently did sixteen miles in the New Forest. We were tired but felt really good, and the best part was no blisters or sore knees. The one constant of my life in Britain has been the glory of walking here. Nearly 25 years on is Notes from a Small

Island a favourite child or a Greatest Hit you’re tired of? I have great fondness of that book – it’s certainly paid for a lot of holidays – and though I haven’t looked at it for a long time, I think if I went back and read it I would still agree with most of what I’ve written. One of the great things with writing a book is that you don’t keep having to go off and do stadium tours and recite it. Like most writers, I’m pretty retiring and am much happier being alone in a quiet room. Can you recall thinking ‘This is going to be big!’ It was really strange – I kind of missed out on the success of it, because the whole idea of the book was that we were moving to America and this was my farewell to Britain. So we moved and as it happened I really regretted the decision. It was like moving back in with your parents in middle age. So I was really preoccupied with feeling sorry for myself, in that way, and I had an ocean between me and any of the attention the book was getting – even though I was absolutely, deliriously happy it meant I didn didn’t have to go to an office anymore. For a few years when I would come back to Britain, I did find I was recognised on the underground and it was all very pleasant, and then that sort of faded away after a while and now I’m very comfortably back in the situation that if anybody recognises me I have no sense of it. Which is how I like it. Have you changed since the Bill of that book? I would like to think I’ve become kinder and more tolerant. One thing I’ve learnt is if you make fun of a real person, it can hurt their feelings. You sort of think of them as being impervious, somehow, and then when I got famous and people made remarks about me, I realised that stings. You regret being mean about Mrs Smegma? I am sure she’s long dead by now but it was funny. There really was a guest house in Dover but Mrs Smegma really was a kind of amalgam of several experiences I had. All the things actually happened at one point or another on my first hitchhiking trip around Britain, but not all in one place. Is Britain still as lovable a place? Yes, we are exquisitely happy where we are right now and that is the thing that is the kind of paradox that most of us live with. You go out of your front

“My room was... cold and cheerless, with melamine furniture, grubbily matted carpet and those mysterious ceiling stains that bring to mind a neglected corpse in the room above“NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND 25 years on from writing Britain’s best-loved travel book Bill Bryson talks walking, what’s next, and why he’s never leaving Blighty.

door and walk to the pub, you probably live in a place with pleasant people all around you, and most experiences in life are good. The things in life that are exasperating or seem to be completely foolish are the things happening in this remote way, in Westminster. Although they affect us directly, they are not happening in the foreground of our lives. The thing that strikes me when I see politicians now – and this is not just a British thing – is the mediocrity, on all sides, and that’s not a political observation but a sociological one. Where are the people that will lead us out of these messes that we are stumbling into? I could live with Brexit if there was someone I trusted that was leading us there but what horrifies me is that it’s being done by people who are complete idiots. I find that very alarming and it’s the same with America. There is nothing but non-entities wherever you look. Do you think we have a distinctively British attitude to the outdoors? One of the things I most adore about this country is that ability to be overjoyed with tiny things. It’s still the case that the average British person, of any social background or economic place on the ladder, you give them a cup of tea and a teacake and they will be ecstatic and I think that is so endearing. My whole life is built around that concept now – of learning the satisfaction of small pleasures and not expecting too much. It’s a totally alien concept for Americans, who are always looking for some massive payoff for everything, but it’s healthy for your body and your mind to be satisfied by smaller things. I think the British climate helps. Because very often on walks it rains and you’ve got to go through those experiences so that you have the real pleasure, when you have the glorious sunshine. Can you recall any more walking epiphanies? We stayed in Crickhowell and we did a day in the autumn, along the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal. It’s not particularly famous or spectacular but again it was so beautiful, all the fallen leaves were adrift on the water and the backdrop was the Brecon Beacons all around you. You think, life doesn’t

“One of the sustaining pleasures of a long tramp in the country is the thought that eventually you will find a room in a snug hostelry, have a series of drinks before a blazing fire and then dine on hearty viands to which the day’s exercise and fresh air have clearly entitled you” NOT E S FROM A SMAL L I S L AND “And then, just as I was about to lie down and call for a stretcher, we crested a final rise and found ourselves abruptly, magically, on top of the earth, on a platform in the sky, amid an ocean of swelling summits. I had never seen anything half so beautiful before. ‘F____ me’ I said, in a moment of special eloquence and realized I was hooked.” ( ON C L IMB I NG HAY S TACKS ), NOT E S FROM A SMAL L I S L AND

get any better than this. Britain is still the best country on Earth to be a walker. I know there are lots of other countries that are very beautiful but for me Britain has everything you want – history, very lovely landscapes that have been mostly looked after really quite well since time immemorial, and it’s all built to a scale that’s very approachable. You can walk here and have the wonderful sense of being out in the world but at the end of the day end up in a pub or a guest house, have a hot shower and some beer and go out for a nice meal. Which to me is the way walking ought to be – rather than being out on the Appalachian Trail, being cold and wet, smelling foul and eating Pot Noodles. Britain is built for walking.

What’s still on your bucket list?

I’ve never gone to the top of Scafell, Snowdon or Ben Nevis, and I feel I ought to. I’m deeply ashamed I still haven’t finished the South Downs Way and I’d really like to do the Coast to Coast – I did the first three or four days of it, as part of a charity hike and it was the hardest walking I have ever done in Britain but God it was glorious. More than anything, if I could right now, I would grab my wife and go off to the Yorkshire Dales, go walking for four or five days. We lived up there together but didn’t walk there together.

What’s stopping you?

I’ve got to finish a book – the final two chapters anyway – about the human body which will be out next autumn. The whole idea is that I got to this age – 64 when I started doing the book – and I realised that I have no idea how I am put together, I don’t know where my spleen is or what it does or any of that stuff inside you. So, it’s me, exploring the human body and trying to understand how we work.

Does walking help with your writing?

If I’m stuck on something I am writing about, it’s miraculous how you can go on a walk and not even think about it but then it all becomes clear the next time you sit at a computer screen. It completely refreshes me in my ability to produce stuff as well as making me feel good and glad to be alive.

Will you write another book about a long walk?

It’s the hardest thing to write about walking, even though it’s wonderfully refreshing and a joy to do, it’s really hard to describe what it is that is pleasurable about that. To do a long trail would be like trying to write about a series of really long, hot baths. It’s a great experience that you really enjoy but nobody wants to read about it, over and over again. That’s the trouble I found about A Walk In The Woods, there comes a point that you cannot describe that day’s walk again. As you get into the book, you see that I go off on these tangents because I can’t spend another 1000 words talking about what it was like walking on day 48 or whatever.

"The air filled with swirling particles of ice that hit the skin like razor nicks. At the top I counted thirty-three people there ahead of us, huddled among the fog-whitened boulders with sandwiches, flasks and madly fluttering maps, and tried to imagine how I would explain this to a foreign onlooker. We sat eating floppy cheeseand-pickle sandwiches, staring into an impenetrable murk, and I thought, God, I love this country." NOTES FROM A SMALL ISLAND

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret." A WAL K I N THE WOODS

You’ve lived the majority of your life in Britain now – 34 years here, 32 the US – do you consider yourself fully assimilated? There are certain things that I can never be properly British about and one is that I prefer lager. Not only prefer it, it’s all I can drink. That’s a matter of quiet shame to me. I think I get as much pleasure out of going to the pub as anyone who is born here but I will order a lager, I can’t help it. I apologise.

The other thing is, I will never really care about cricket, there is no way you can make me enjoy it, I am a complete failure at it.

On the credit side, I cannot go an afternoon without a cup of tea. Oh and I attend a film night in the village hall twice a month in the winter where they show movies, mostly the kind your wife would like, and I can get a very warm lager because I’m the only one drinking it. It’s like a little cocktail party with all the people from the village, you have a drink, get to know your neighbours a bit, then sit on a very uncomfortable metal chair and watch a movie, projected on a small screen on the wall. It’s wonderful, fantastic. Do you have any plans to move again or have we got you for good? I cannot imagine circumstances, not least because I have ten grandchildren that are all here. We are really happy where we are, it’s beautiful and it’s equidistant from our three children who live in Britain. Also there are lots of paths – and walking is a fundamental part of what gives me the most pleasure in life.

NEVER DOWN IN THE DOWNS ‘I would love to retire and do this every day. All the activities you can imagine, I would get bored of them, except walking.’THE KEY TO THE KINGDOM The book that earned its author the affection of his once and future compatriots, and the freedom to write what he wanted.

THE NEW FORESTAbove: Not far from his Hampshire home, and a regular target for walks in the woods. Above left: Haystacks, and the view that switched hill-walking from agony to ecstasy for the younger Bill.

A WALK IN THE WOODS Bill was played by Robert Redford in the film of his book. “Black bears rarely attack. But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do. That doesn’t happen often, but – and here is the absolutely salient point – once would be enough.”

 VALE OF WHITE HORSE The Manger on White Horse Hill – a Ridgeway lookout that prompts Bill to marvel at the landscape’s great age and beauty in The Road to Little Dribbling.BOW FELL The site of one of Bill’s awakenings to the appeal of eating hardboiled eggs in freezing fog; AKA the pleasures of British hillwalking.