Bryson’s nostalgic look on a UK that once was
Author is at his most finest, writes Beverley Roos-Muller
MULTI-TALENTED author Bill Bryson is best known for his hilarious travel books, his first big best-seller being Notes from a Small Island, the quirky, likeable journey of discovery he made as a young man finding his feet as an American abroad in Britain.
Now he’s older, fatter, grandfatherly, but still walking long distances (not always quite as easily) and after 20 years it’s time, suggests his publisher – “little glinting pound signs where his irises normally were”, records Bryson – for a sequel. Bryson likes travelling and thinks this is not a bad idea; and resolves to create a new “straight line” from one end of Britain to the other without crossing salt water, calling it the Bryson Line.
The longest line across Britain is not from Land’s End to John o’Groats, whatever the guide books say. For one thing, John o’Groats isn’t its most northerly point. So he lays a ruler on a map and discovers that the longest Bryson Line he can observe seems to lie between Bognor Regis and a lonely Scottish promontory named Cape Wrath. Without much further ado and the promise that he won’t actually stick so closely to the line that he tramples through people’s living rooms or has to wade through foaming rivers, he sets off to “rediscover” Britain.
The Road to Little Dribbling is very readable, as are all his books. Now he’s no longer the boggling young naif but a seasoned traveller and slightly old fartish, complaining like most of his generation (including me) about things we miss, and wondering why most British shopkeepers are so pointedly rude. Do they attend a special course in it, I used to wonder when I lived in England, mentored by Basil Fawlty?
Besides being best known for his travel writing, Bryson is also a distinguished linguist (having published several books on the subject, my favourite being The Mother Tongue). He was elected an honorary member of the Royal Society following the publication of his marvellous book A Short History of Nearly Everything, and had a spell as chancellor of Durham University.
The Road to Little Dribbling is a pleasant, slightly nostalgic take on the Britain that once was, and the best of what remains. It isn’t quite as funny as his youthful A Walk in the Woods (a slightly mad account of he and his friend Katz walking the Appalachian Trail – now a movie) or Down Under, which annoyed Australians so much they told him not to come back, but which is the only book on Oz that ever made me want to visit the country.
There are many good reasons to read The Road to Little Dribbling, for Bryson at his finest and most scathing, is peerless. He concludes with the reasons he loves England (just as well, as he recently became a citizen): its countryside is lovely beyond imagining, it is fundamentally sane including having proper gun control laws, and it is so crammed full of amazing sites that it’s unknowable in one lifetime, and therefore perpetually fascinating.
His list of the “best of British” things includes Boxing Day (the extra holiday after Christmas), country pubs, sayings like “you’re the dog’s bollocks” as an expression of endearment, jam roly-poly with custard, the shipping forecast, and villages with ridiculous names like Nether Wallop (one of my own favourites is the Isle of Dogs, where my nephew briefly lived).
He also admires the way the British are good at remaining cheery when others would falter: “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,” he writes.