Bill and me

I’m reading Bill Bryson’s latest book, The Road to Little Dribbling, and enjoying it greatly. We share a fondness for this part of the world that makes reading him like chatting with a friend where you repeatedly discover similar tastes in music or cuisine. Here he is on that natural beauty of England and Wales, which I would extend to Northern Ireland: “In terms of natural wonders, you know, Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 50,318 square miles the world has ever known--almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics in mind, but all of it adding up to something that is, quite often, perfect.”

I don’t think there is the same deference to natural beauty in the U.S., where land is indiscriminately developed into strip malls, subdivisions, big box stores and massive car parks, fast food outlets, and so on. Even the number of cars per house--and trampolines and RVs and boats and other visual clutter--is something we don’t contend with here.

He makes another point that I am making note of for when I’m healthy again:
“England and Wales have 130,000 miles of public footpaths, about 2.2 miles of path for every square mile of area. People in Britain don’t realise how extraordinary that is. If you told someone in the Midwest of America, where I come from, that you intended to spend the weekend walking across farmland, they would look at you as if you were out of your mind. You couldn’t do it anyway. Every field you crossed would end in a barrier of barbed wire. You would find no helpful stiles, no kissing gates, no beckoning wooden footpath posts to guide you on your way. All you would get would be a farmer with a shotgun wondering what the hell you were doing blundering around in his alfalfa.”
12-11