Stateside twin who stole my thunder

BILL Bryson has one of those minds that I envy. Mind you, he may be a dreadful bore in real life, but I doubt it. A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of those books that you read and then want to go back to page one and begin all over again. And I loved One Summer, which is a great account of 1927. A lot happened in 1927.

I didn’t know Bryson had written a book about growing up in America, but when I came across The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid in the Samaritans shop I knew I wouldn’t go far wrong for a euro. I felt a bit mean pocketing the change. This has to be the best euro I have spent in a long time. Far better than a third of a cup of coffee or half an ice cream. The cover said it was a ‘laugh out loud’ book. I never believe that. This time it was true.

Bryson is around my age. The similarities in our upbringings, despite him being in a world that had fridges and televisions when we only had pictures of them, are remarkable. Many of them revolve around thrift. He came from a family where you did not throw things out unless they were threadbare. Food was recycled endlessly in more and more creative ways to avoid ever throwing something out while there were still people starving in the world. His mother was the patron saint of Waste Not Want Not and mine was a close second. She would have put charity shops out of business. Why hand it on when you could darn it?

I still avoid waste and conspicuous consumption like the plague. But I have weak spots. As a child I saved my pocket money like a miser and watched as the pennies became shillings and eventually pounds. If I ever get a tattoo (and I won’t) it would probably read “Watch the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves”, which is not very cool. I loved cutting grass and would have trimmed Croke Park for sixpence. Until I discovered music. I had about £30, a small fortune, in my Post Office account when I discovered LPs. I remember lying on the floor with one speaker each side of my head listening to the Marrakesh Express and Helplessly Hoping on the first Crosby Stills & Nash album. It may even have been in mono, but this was a sound that I had never even imagined could exist. Then came Deja Vu. I would have cut every lawn in Ireland to have enough money to buy the Doors or Love. I still have my copy of Love’s Da Capo. In a lesson that stays with me to this day, by the time Sgt Pepper was released my savings were gone but I had 30 albums and I knew every note. That was as close as I ever came to stealing from my mother’s purse.

I don’t know why Bill Bryson became such a good writer that he made it his life’s work. Maybe he had a head start on me as his father was a sportswriter — thought by many to be the finest baseball writer ever.

Bill and I had much in common as youngsters, despite being kept apart by a large body of water. We both loved education and hated school. I recognised his teachers. They must have been cloned.

LPs were the first symptom of my gradual decline. I counted 50 pairs of shoes on my landing today. My guess is Bill makes do with two.

I just wasn’t cut out to be a Thunderbolt Kid.