The Road to Little Dribbling

Today was book club. Everyone liked Bill Bryson’s book. I thought it was interesting that people liked his tetchy side, tetchy meaning irritable. He can be cutting and curt with shopkeepers for instance, usually due to bad service. I think people enjoy that side of him because we all have to manage our frustrations in the frustrating world in which we live.

I have three observations:

1. He did an about face from Notes from a Small Island, in which he was critical of the British for being pessimists who are resigned to poor service, bad food, and bad weather. In this book, he clearly was happier living in Britain, both for its Britishness and for it’s being the antithesis of America in many ways. I remember him being a grousing curmudgeon in “Notes” whereas he was happy as Larry in this book--the occasional tetchy remark aside.
2. I admire his endless curiosity. He has a habit of going into obscure museums or hiking to out of the way, forgotten landmarks because he has an insatiable desire to understand how things work (he wrote a book on this) and how people have shaped their environment.
3. And how people have shaped their environment is, on the whole, a positive in Britain and a negative in America. I am very simpatico with him on this point. I also share his love of so many parts of the British character. Here’s an example, which followed his recounting of a charity walk he did in the lovely Lake District to raise funds for cancer, charity walks being an everyday thing here:
   “When we moved to New Hampshire in 1995 and learned that one of our neighbours was doing the Boston Marathon, I said to her ‘Oh, I’ll sponsor you,’ and she looked horrified. She thought I meant that I would sponsor her as Nike or Adidas might, as a commercial proposition, and that I would expect her to wear sandwich boards saying, ‘Buy Bill Bryson’s Books’ or something. The idea of running to raise money for charity was completely unknown. So that is just another small thing that makes Britain rather a special place."
   1-4