Painful night I discovered the joys (and pitfalls) of your British beer

I managed to fall UP the hotel’s stairs

AMERICAN Bill Bryson’s brilliant and affectionate book about Britain, Notes From A Small Island, is capturing hearts 20 years on in our serialisation. Yesterday, we heard his hilarious account of an off-season visit to Bournemouth. Today, he over-indulges in Liverpool, and is a reluctant shopper with his wife in Harrogate...

ONe weekend I took a train to Liverpool. They were having a festival of litter when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes, and carrier bags to the otherwise bland and neglected landscape. They fluttered gaily in the bushes and brought colour and texture to pavements and gutters. And to think that elsewhere we stick these objects in rubbish bags.

In another bout of extravagant madness, I had booked a room in the Adelphi Hotel. I had seen it from the street on earlier visits and it appeared to have an old-fashioned grandeur about it that I was keen to investigate.

On the other hand, it looked expensive and I wasn’t sure my trousers could stand another session in the trouser press. So I was most agreeably surprised when I checked in to discover that I was entitled to a special weekend rate and that there would be money spare for a nice meal and a parade of beer in any of the many wonderful pubs in which Liverpool specialises.

And so, soon afterwards, I found myself, like all fresh arrivals in Liverpool, in the grand and splendorous surroundings of the Philharmonic, clutching a pint glass and rubbing shoulders with a happy Friday-evening throng.

The Phil (you can call it this if you have been there twice) was in fact a bit too crowded for my liking. There was nowhere to sit and scarcely any room to stand, so I drank two pints, just enough at my time of life to need a pee — for there is no place in the world finer for a pee than the ornate gents’ room of the Philharmonic — then went off to find some place a little quieter.

I ended up in a place called The Vines, which was nearly as ornate as the Philharmonic but infinitely quieter.

Apart from me, there were only three other customers, which was a mystery to me because it was a very fine pub with wood panelling by some Grinling Gibbons wannabe and a plaster ceiling even more ornate than the panelling.

As I was sitting there drinking my beer and savouring my plush surroundings, some guy came in with a collecting tin from which the original label had been clumsily scratched, and asked me for a donation for handicapped children.

‘Which handicapped children?’ I asked. ‘Ones in wheelchairs like.’ ‘I mean which organisation do you represent?’

‘It’s, er, the, er, Handicapped Children’s Organisation like.’

‘Well, as long as it’s totally legitimate,’ I said and gave him 20p.

And that is what I like so much about Liverpool. The factories may be gone, there may be no work, the city may be pathetically dependent on football for its sense of destiny, but the Liverpudlians still have character and initiative, and they don’t bother you with preposterous ambitions to win the bid for the next Olympics.

So nice was The Vines that I drank two more pints and then realised that I really ought to get something in my stomach lest I grow giddy and end up staggering into street furniture and singing ‘Mother Machree’. Outside, the hill on which the pub stood seemed suddenly and unaccountably steep and taxing, until it dawned on me, in my mildly addled state, that I had come down it before whereas now I was going up it, which seemed to put everything in a new light.

I found myself, after no great distance, standing outside a Greek restaurant and surveying the menu with a hint of a sway.

I’m not much of one for Greek food — no disrespect to a fine cuisine, you understand, but I always feel as if I could boil my own leaves if I had a taste for that sort of thing — but the restaurant was so forlornly empty and the proprietress beckoned at me with such imploring eyes that I found myself wandering in.

Well, the meal was wonderful. I have no idea what I ate, but it was abundant and delicious and they treated me like a prince. Foolishly I washed it all down with many additional draughts of beer.

By the time I finished and settled the bill, leaving a tip of such lavishness as to bring the whole family to the kitchen door, and began the long process of stabbing an arm at a mysteriously disappearing jacket sleeve, I was, I fear, pretty nearly intoxicated.

I staggered out into the fresh air, feeling suddenly queasy and largely incapable.

Now the second rule of excessive drinking (the first, of course, is don’t take a sudden shine to a woman larger than Hoss Cartwright) is never to drink in a place on a steep slope.

I walked down the hill on unfamiliar legs that seemed to snap out in front of me like whipped lengths of rope.

The Adelphi, glowing beckoningly at the foot of the hill, managed the interesting trick of being both nearby and astonishingly distant. It was like looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope — a sensation somewhat enhanced by the fact that my head was a good seven or so yards behind my manically flopping appendages.

I followed them helplessly, and by a kind of miracle they hurtled me down the hill, safely across the road and up the steps to the entrance to the Adelphi, where I celebrated my arrival by making a complete circuit in the revolving door so that I emerged into open air once again, before plunging back in and being flung with a startling suddenness into the Adelphi’s grand and lofty lobby.

I had one of those where-amI moments, then grew aware that the night staff were silently watching me.

Summoning as much dignity as I could and knowing that the lifts would be quite beyond me, I went to the grand staircase and managed — I know not how — to fall up them in a manner uncannily reminiscent of a motion picture run in reverse. All I know is that at the very end I leapt backwards to my feet and

announced to the craning faces that I was quite all right, and then embarked on a long search for my room among the Adelphi’s endless and mysteriously numbered corridors. I went shopping with my wife in Harrogate — or rather I had a look around Harrogate while she went shopping.

Shopping is not, in my view, something that men and women should do together, since all men want to do is buy something noisy like a drill and get it home so they can play with it, whereas women aren’t happy until they’ve seen more or less everything in town and felt at least 1,500 different textures.

Am I alone in being mystified by this strange compulsion on the part of women to feel things in shops? I have many times seen my wife go 20 or 30 yards out of her way to touch something — a mohair jumper or a velveteen bed jacket or something.

‘Do you like that?’ I’ll say in surprise, since it doesn’t seem her type of thing, and she’ll look at me as if I’m mad. ‘that?’ she’ll say. ‘no, it’s hideous.’

‘then why on earth,’ I always want to say, ‘did you walk all the way over there to touch it?’

But of course, like all long-term husbands I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say — ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I’m bored’, ‘My feet are tired’, ‘Yes, that one looks nice on you, too’, ‘well, have them both then’, ‘Oh, for f **** sake’, ‘Can’t we just go home?’, ‘Monsoon? Again? Oh, for f **** sake’, ‘where have I been? where have you been?’, ‘then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?’ — it doesn’t pay, so I say nothing.

On this day, Mrs B was in shoeshopping mode, which means hours and hours of making some poor guy in a cheap suit fetch endless boxes of more or less identical footwear and then deciding not to have anything, so I wisely decided to clear off and have a look at the town.

to show her I love her, I took her for coffee and cake at Bettys (and at Bettys prices you need to be pretty damn smitten), where she issued me with her usual precise instructions for a rendezvous.

‘three o’clock outside woolworths. But listen — stop fiddling with that and listen — if Russell & Bromley don’t have the shoes I want I’ll have to go to Ravel, in which case meet me at 3.15 by the frozen foods in Marks.

‘Otherwise I’ll be in Hammick’s in the cookery books section or possibly the children’s books — unless I’m in Boots feeling toasters. But probably, in fact, I’ll be at Russell & Bromley trying on all the same shoes all over again, in which case meet me outside next no later than 3.27. Have you got that?’ ‘Yes.’ no. ‘Don’t let me down.’ ‘Of course not.’ In your dreams. And then with a kiss she was gone. I finished my coffee and savoured the elegant, old-fashioned ambience of this fine institution where the waitresses still wear frilly caps and white aprons over black dresses.

there ought to be more places like this, if you ask me. It may cost an arm and a leg for a cafetiere and a sticky bun, but it is worth every penny and they will let you sit there all day, which I seriously considered doing now as it was so agreeable.

But then I thought I really ought to have a look around the town, so I paid the bill and hauled myself off through the shopping precinct to have a look at Harrogate’s newest feature, the Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre.

the name is a bit rich because they built it on top of Victoria Gardens, so it really ought to be called the nice Little Gardens Destroyed By this Shopping Centre. I wouldn’t mind this so much, but they also demolished the last great public toilets in Britain — a little subterranean treasure house of polished tiles and gleaming brass in the aforementioned gardens.

the Gents was simply wonderful and I’ve had good reports about the Ladies as well.

I might not even mind this so much either but the new shopping centre is just heartbreakingly awful, the worst kind of pastiche architecture — a sort of Bath Crescent meets Crystal Palace with a roof by B&Q.

For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with lifesized 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 —

Why do women have to touch things in shops?

but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

On the Station Parade side of the building, where the pleasant little Victoria Gardens and their pleasant little public toilets formerly existed, there is now a kind of open-air amphitheatre of steps, where I suppose it is intended for people to sit on those two or three days a year when Yorkshire is sunny, and high above the road there has been built a truly preposterous covered footbridge in the same Georgian Italianate/F***-Knows style connecting the shopping centre to a multi-storey car park across the way.

now, on the basis of my earlier remarks about Britain’s treatment of its architectural heritage, you may foolishly have supposed that I would be something of an enthusiast for this sort of thing. Alas, no.

If by pastiche you mean a building that takes some note of its neighbours and perhaps takes some care to match adjoining rooflines and echo the size and position of its neighbours’ windows and door openings and that sort of thing, then yes I am in favour of it.

But if by pastiche you mean a kind of Disney-land version of Jolly Olde england like this laughable heap before me, then thank you but no.

You could argue, I suppose — and I dare say Victoria Gardens’ architect would — that at least it shows some effort to inject traditional architectural values into the townscape and that it is less jarring to the sensibilities than the nearby glass-and-plastic box in which the Co-op is happy to reside (which is, let me say here, a building of consummate ugliness).

But in fact it seems to me that it is just as bad as, and in its way even more uninspired and unimaginative than, the wretched Co-op building.

(But let me also say that neither is even remotely as bad as the Maples building, a Sixties block that rises, like some kind of half-witted practical joke, a dozen or so storeys into the air in the middle of a long street of innocuous Victorian structures. now how did that happen?)

So what are we to do with Britain’s poor battered towns if I won’t let you have Richard Seifert and I won’t let you have walt Disney? I wish I knew. More than this, I wish the architects knew.

Surely there must be some way to create buildings that are stylish and forward-looking without destroying the overall ambience of their setting. Most other european nations manage it (with the notable and curious exception of the French). So why not here?

But enough of this tedious bleating. Harrogate is basically a very fine town, and far less scarred by careless developments than many other communities.

It has in the Stray, a 215-acre sweep of parklike common land overlooked by solid, prosperous homes, one of the largest and most agreeable open spaces in the country. It has some nice old hotels, a pleasant shopping area and, withal, a genteel and well-ordered air.

It is, in short, as nice a town as you will find anywhere. It reminds me, in a pleasantly english way, a little of Baden-Baden, which is, of course, not surprising since it was likewise a spa town in its day — and a very successful one, too.

According to a leaflet I picked up at the Royal Pump Room Museum, as late as 1926 they were still dispensing as many as 26,000 glasses of sulphurous water in a single day. You can still drink the water if you want.

According to a notice by the tap, it is reputedly very good for flatulence, which seemed an intriguing promise, and I very nearly drank some until I realised they meant it prevented it. what an odd notion.

I had a look around the museum and walked past the old Swan Hotel, where Agatha Christie went and hid after she found out that her husband was a philanderer, the beastly cad, then wandered up Montpellier Parade, a very pretty street filled with awesomely expensive antique shops.

I examined the 75ft-high war Memorial, and went for a long, pleasantly directionless amble through the Stray, thinking how nice it must be to live in one of the big houses overlooking the park and be able to stroll to the shops.

You would never guess that a place as prosperous and decorous as Harrogate could inhabit the same zone of the country as Bradford or Bolton, but of course that is the other thing about the

This was as nice a town as you’d find anywhere

north — it has these pockets of immense prosperity, like Harrogate and Ilkley, that are even more decorous and flushed with wealth than their counterparts in the South.

Makes it a much more interesting place, if you ask me.

eventually, with the afternoon fading, I took myself back into the heart of the shopping area, where I scratched my head and, with a kind of panicky terror, realised I didn’t have the faintest idea where or when I had agreed to meet my dear missus.

I was standing there wearing an expression like Stan Laurel when he turns around to find that the piano he was looking after is rolling down a steep hill with Ollie aboard, legs wriggling, when by a kind of miracle my wife walked up.

‘Hello, dear!’ she said brightly. ‘I must say, I never expected to find you here waiting for me.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, give me a bit of credit, please. I’ve been here ages.’

And arm in arm we strode off into the wintry sunset.

NOTES From A Small Island: Journey Through Britain by Bill Bryson (Black Swan, £8.99). To order a copy for £7.19 (20 per cent discount) visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640, p&p is free on orders over £15. Offer valid until August 24.