Trivion Books

Bill Bryson says he never found Little Dribbling and I don’t know whether or not such a place exists, or whether Little Dribbling is simply Bryson’s facetious reference to the fact that many of the place-names in Britain are ridiculous/unbelievable.

This is the second book Bryson has written about travelling around Britain. He promises us that he has purposely chosen not to visit the same places twice (or at least not write the same things about the same places twice); so when it is my distinct impression that I’ve read some of it before, I assume that I have read it in Paul Theroux’s book on the same subject.

What I love about Bryon is his humour and the fact that he seems to write about whatever comes into his head, which often gives rise to this humour. He is one of the funniest authors I know.

He is an American, married to an Englishwoman, and has lived in England for many years.

He remarks about how he felt about Britain when first coming there - “I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous.”

He tells us about taking a British citizenship test and mentions a few of the obscure questions, answers to which you’re obliged to know. I had complete sympathy for him because I have recently taken a Danish citizenship test containing similarly inane questions, the answers to which extremely few Danes could answer.

He also points out that you have to know a few things that aren’t in fact true, like you have to state that Land’s End and John O’Groats are the two most distant points in the British Mainland, even though they are not.

I’ve had this problem too, not particularly in the Danish Citizenship test, but in various other tests and the like, where you have to work out what the people formulating the questions apparently assume are the correct answers, even though you know they are not.

That’s one of the things I like about reading Bryson’s books, that we seem to be on the same wave length.

Bryson tells us how lucky we Britons are, as compared, for example, to Americans, because in England and Wales there are 130,000 miles of public footpaths, about 2.2. miles of path for every square mile of area.

You walk across farmland; there are helpful stiles, kissing gates, footpath posts. In the US what you would get would be a farmer with a shotgun.

The main danger in these walking trips were cow attacks. Cows kill a lot more people than bulls. Walkers in Britain “are killed by cows all the time”. “Four people were fatally trampled in one eight-week period in 2009 alone.”

In B’s view, London is the best city in the world; it is one of the least crowded – New York has 93 people per hectare, Paris 83, but London has just 43.

It has 142 parks - “about 40 percent of London is green space”.

London has 150 ancient monuments, 500 archaeological sites, 43 universities (!) and nearly 300 museums.

B goes into Mark’s and Spencer’s and is perturbed to find their grocery department has vanished. There is no food hall. He calls a shop assistant an idiot because the latter says there’s never been a food hall there, only to find that the shop was not a Mark’s and Spencer’s but an H&M. Marks and Spencer’s was next door.

At Minstead he visits the grave of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and informs us about him – he wrote twenty books on spiritualism and opened a psychic bookshop near Westminster Abbey. According to B, Doyle became increasingly “loopy”” since he believed in fairies. (I’m loopy too, then.) He wrote a book called “”The coming of the fairies”. “He passed his days sitting quietly in the woods – waiting – for fairies to emerge (they never did)”.

He visited Jane Austen’s home in Chawton; she died in 1817 at the age of forty-one of an unknown cause, which may have been arsenic poisoning due to arsenic being routinely used in making wallpaper and for colouring fabrics.

He visits Avebury, the greatest stone circle in Europe (I’ve been there too).It is a World Heritage Site, yet he finds the museum “perfunctory and uninspired”.

Just over a mile from Avebury is Silbury Hill, the tallest prehistoric mound in the world, It is 130 feet high and entirely made by hand. It has no known purpose; it is not a burial mound. But at some point in “the massively distant “ past some people decided to make it.

Nearby lies the West Kennett Long barrow, a large burial chamber. B discovered an entrance, semi-hidden behind a massive rock. The barrow is 300 feet long and was built fifty-five hundred years ago. Fewer than 50 people were interred there.

B was so glad he had “traipsed”” up there. He stood on the roof of the barrow and felt like a conqueror.

He makes fun of the British system of road numbering, and says it doesn’t actually work.

The British are an ingenious race. Japan’s Ministry of international Trade and Industry made a study of national inventiveness and concluded that Britain had produced 35 percent of the world’s “significant inventions” against 22 percent for the United States and 6 percent for Japan.

It is remarkable how often Britons invent or discover something of great value, then fail to cash in on it.

B informs us that the list of things invented, discovered or developed in Britain that benefited Britain barely or not at all includes “computers, radar, the endoscope, the zoom lens, holography, in vitro fertilization, animal cloning, magnetically levitated trains and Viagra.

“Only the jet engine and antibiotics are British inventions from which the British still benefit.”

Britain invented the train, but now owing to the closing of innumerable stations and train lines by long-dead politicians, many places cannot be reached by train, and bus services are poor, so B had to travel across Devon and Cornwall by car.

He compares “”the titanic indifference” of the average Briish shopkeeper with the “suffocating attention” of American ones.

He feels like British shopkeepers loathe you coming into their shop and touching things. And “would it kill them to say hello”?

But he is not going to buy anything anyway because he thinks everything costs too much and he has everything he needs already.

We discover that Bryson drinks a lot of beer, sometimes due to having to wait ages for meals he has ordered.

In the course of the book he uses the f- and the s-words more and mre frequently, mostly when describing the negative features of British life.

Now Bill tackles a subject dear to my heart – the massive amount of punctuation mistakes made by many people these days.

He states “”People everywhere have abandoned whole elements of grammatical English”.

He quotes Brian Cox, whoever he is, saying “Me and my friend – have reached the same solution.” Members of my own family too use “”Me” instead of “I”. I can safely write this here since none of my family would ever dream of reading any of my reviews. Like Bryson, I don’t get it, since nobody would ever say “Me have reached the same solution”. Why do they use “Me” when they add another person to the subject?

He quotes several well-known persons as making this mistake. He ends by stating “”Stop it!”

I suppose this is how language changes – by people making the same mistakes so many times that it becomes commonplace to make these mistakes, so they are eventually regarded as correct.

To sum up, this book is vastly amusing, like all Bryson’s books; it is filled wth entertaining stories. He has done thorough research both into Britain’s history and contemporary happenings of interest.

I’m bit fed up with reading about Britain and next time I'll be reading his “”A Walk in the Woods”, which I believe is about the U.S.… (plus d'informations)