AndrewR

Not really important ....but....

To anyone contemplating moving back to UK, but who has been put off the idea by negatives comments etc, I can only suggest trying to get hold of the interview Bill Bryson gave in 'The sunday times' this week.
He himself is moving back to England after a few years in his native america, and as he says its not perfect (we could perhaps improve at cricket) but its still the best place in the world to do a whole heap of different things.
Anyway...just an idea.

captaincook

would love to read it

but refuse to pay mr murdoch £39.99 for a years subscription to the sunday times on the internet.

don't suppose anybody in UK that does'nt have to pay minds posting it here so we can all have a read !!

pommiesheila

Can you possibly post it on here (or at least a synopsis?) I`m reading "Notes from a Small Island" at the moment, and am getting very homesick!!!

AndrewR

Can understand not wanting to pay Murdoch!!
I would love to post it here, but unfortunately I read it in my local library (i'm in vancouver) and don't fancy getting nicked trying to steal paper!

baloo

Oh okay...

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Interview: Jasper Gerard meets Bill Bryson: I really love you boring Brits



Who encapsulates the essence of Englishness: Chaucer’s pilgrims, Austen’s lovers, Dickens’s scallywags, Hardy’s rustics, Wodehouse’s batty aunts? Nope. Bryson’s bores.
Bill Bryson is not of the canon; indeed, after readers voted his Notes from a Small Island the work that best captures our national character, literary snooties treated him more like cannon fodder. This has much to do with the awkward truth that Bryson was not born and bred in Canterbury nor Wessex but Des Moines, Iowa, and reckons we Anglos have wasted half a century regarding ourselves as “chronic failures�.

But book buyers are right to choose him over the greats. How English are pilgrims? Why eulogise delicate courtship when couples enjoy the full monty in pub car parks 10 minutes after closing? Why worry about hungry Dickensian urchins when their descendants stuff their faces with vindaloo? Why romanticise The Mayor of Casterbridge when he would now be a management consultant in a Wimpy executive home? And why chuckle about eccentric toffs when we have truly become a society without class? Bryson gives us Britain as it is: crotchety landladies (“my room was everything I expected — cold and cheerless�) and rude strangers who bang on about train rivets. It sounds dreadful, like Vladivostok without the hedonism, yet Bryson summons Britain’s full horror, then declares it heaven.

So the book could only have been written by a stranger who nevertheless knew the terrain more intimately than a local. “I said some fairly saccharine things about Britain and if I were English, I would have been seen as a smug git,� he smiles. Indeed, he wrote: “This is still the best place in the world for most things — to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use a bank, get lost, seek help or stand on a hillside and take in the view.�

Was there, I wonder, a hint of flattery in Notes from a Small Island (Britain — or England; he does not really distinguish — was after all its biggest market), which was first published in 1996? “No, it was genuine. England’s not perfect: you could play cricket a bit better,� he says. “But I wouldn’t have lived through 20 years of Thatcherism if I didn’t really like the place.�

Indeed he, his English wife and their large brood plan to leave New England for old England for good after several years in America. “We have been thinking about little else for some time,� he says with the sincerity of a new boarder remembering mother’s hot cross buns (he met his missus, a nurse, shortly after arriving in London when he worked in a psychiatric hospital). “In America you go to a shopping mall and think, ‘Is this all our society is about?’ It’s just one big materialist machine.� Bryson, then, is an American who makes us feel a little better about being British, which is soul food at a time when our political elite genuflects across the pond. What shocked him when he arrived here in the 1960s at the age of 20 was our “negativity�. “In the 1940s Britain had just won a world war and was a top nation,� he says. “Then for 25 years everyone thought it was declining.� This feeling, he admits, was not pure paranoia — “it really did seem crumbling� — yet Britain still had so much going for it: we fought a “noble� war and “dismantled a mighty empire in an enlightened way�, it had created a “far-seeing welfare state and did almost everything right�.

Plus, he says, “in the 1960s the whole world was British: James Bond, the Beatles, everything. It wasn’t particularly swinging for me, but for a boy from Des Moines it seemed pretty lively walking down the King’s Road.�

Yet there was a pervasive “gloom and a willingness to embrace defeat�. He says: “The British bitched endlessly, almost always about themselves. The way to poleaxe a Brit was to tell them they were better at something.� All very charming, but perhaps as an outsider Bryson can never fully grasp how deeply the loss of superpower status dented our dignity.

He is encouraged that Britain has not only reversed its decline but is now more positive (“a dozen years ago it would have seemed inconceivable that England could win the World Cup, and it would still astound us, but it could happen now. And that’s a metaphor for much else�). Still, there are delicate balances: can-do Americanism, he warns, can often undo what’s most precious.

“Areas of America that are far less populated than Britain are a lot more ruined,� he says. “What worries me most about Britain is its countryside. It is one of Britain’s great achievements that it still has such loveliness in such a ridiculously overcrowded island. And much of that beauty is hand built, not natural, like the churches and hedgerows of the Cotswolds.�

Here perhaps the foreigner has the superior insight. “If you want to preserve that unique asset you’ve got to pay for it, because agriculture is shot,� he says. “You have to treat it like a national park: and not just places that will always be beautiful like the Brecon Beacons: protect places like Surrey.�

For all his revelling in Liverpudlian litter festivals — he chucked the idea into the book as a joke and it is now reality — perhaps what he really loves is an echo of a Hardyesque pastoral Britain (he will soon be house-hunting in Wiltshire or Norfolk). “Make a list of all the attractive things about Britain and they tend to be rural.� His book lists “village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble’, people apologising to me when I conk them with a careless elbow, stinging nettles, seaside piers . . .�

It sounds rather rose-tinted. And what, I ask, is so great about all this anyway? “Well, these are things that are most different to Indianapolis. A big part of me is still the naive American who wants to see a thatched cottage and a cream tea.� Bryson is an (astute) observer rather than a contemplator.

I suggest he prefers the country to the city in Britain because doing rural life well is probably our greatest — the French might say only — contribution to European civilisation. He agrees, but says: “I’ve never really thought about that.� He might reject the term, but he has become at some quite deep level an English romantic. He says that unlike some awestruck American visitors he was “hard� on cities such as Oxford and Cambridge because they were not chocolate box enough.

“I see a secondhand car dealership and I think, ‘Something this ugly shouldn’t be allowed here’,� he says.

So while he points out scars, he searches for perfection. His, then, is a cheerier world than, say, Zadie Smith’s Willesden (which probably explains why Bryson beat her White Teeth to the prize).

But he lived here too long to remain entirely misty-eyed. He displays customary new world distaste for privilege: “I just think it’s quite comical that there can be a Lord Hattersley.� And who could disagree? But it is his identification of the British bore that is his best spot. “Britain does specialise in people who are boring in a technical way: people in pubs, animated, arguing over the best way to get to Truro even though nobody is going there,� he says. This essential dullness is reflected in attitudes to the royal family. He wrote, with customary wit, that he had always found them dull, “then when they finally started doing arresting things and made the News of the World on merit — when they became interesting — the nation was suddenly saying, ‘Shocking, let’s get rid of them’.�

So why come back to boring old Britain? (He will pack the moment his daughter finishes high school this summer.) He has begun to feel alienated by the new belligerence in America. “It’s the attitude that you are either with us or against us that will probably provoke a ferocious, hot-headed terrorist response,� he says. “The anti-French and anti-German feeling is astonishing. The French should feel gratitude to us and to the British, but it doesn’t mean they must obey us for ever. It’s very disturbing America no longer accepts alternative views. It’s the sort of attitude I won’t miss.�

More fundamentally, he has always sought life beyond Des Moines. He recalls that he was one of the few boys who looked at National Geographic for the pictures of naked outcrops rather than naked breasts. “When I arrived in Britain I was transfixed,� he says. “I did feel in an uncanny way that I’d got to the place that I should always have been.�

Interestingly, he never shared his father’s fascination for family trees, saying he thinks his ancestors hail from Scotland via Northern Ireland, “but unless that search leads to the Howard Hughes millions I don’t see any point in it�. Rather than any blood links, these islands simply matched his wry humour. “I don’t know why I feel more at home in Britain,� he says. “If I met a random Briton, I would feel more in common: they are slightly cynical, always looking for a joke. That’s what I miss. You only notice it when you leave. Then you really notice.�






.....cont.....

baloo

.....cont.....



If his accent — after many years, like Graham Greene, toiling onthe sub-editors’ desk of The Times — is Atlantic, but somewhere off Land’s End rather than Maine. He says he will not apply for British nationality. “I am one of the least patriotic people I know, but my being an American is a fact. I don’t want to make myself something I’m not, like Michael Jackson.� But really what passport channel he staggers through is an irrelevance: the guy even likes Marmite and — I put it no higher than this — has a mild appreciation for Coronation Street. Like all travellers, he feels an outsider wherever he is. So in Britain he knows he will have pangs for his beloved Boston Red Sox baseball team (“my passion is almost a sickness�) and “the friendliness at the American checkout that you don’t always find in Britain�. But ultimately he feels he has no choice: “I just don’t feel completely at home in America.�

He has not tired entirely of travel. “I haven’t quite reached the stage where I would say, ‘F--- Hong Kong’. I am a very lucky guy, but being away from my family is one of the downsides.� So at 51, home and rather less work is what he seeks. “I’ve spent lots of time on my own in strange places, and if you had said at any time, ‘Mr Bryson, your helicopter is waiting, your wife and children are expecting you home for dinner’, I would have gone like a shot,� he says.

He is reconciled to a life of “less hair and less strength. I’m a happy person, but you may as well be realistic: it is downhill from here�. And soon home will be down a quintessentially English hill, past clumps of his beloved stitchwort, lady’s bedstraw, blue fleabane and feverfew; slushy, but very sweet. “It’s not entirely rational, my love of Britain,� he says. “It’s like I’m crazy about my wife, but I can’t tell you all the things that are admirable about her. It transcends all that.�

TimEh?

Thanks for that. A very good perspective.

AndrewR

Oh okay...

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Thank you Baloo!

Kath

Many thanks for that - I've printed it off to read later!

pommiesheila

Thanks for that Baloo - nice one.

captaincook

Thank you for taking the trouble to post the article.

Have to say I agree with the point about the tolerance and acceptance of alternative views. I miss that too.

baloo

No problem

I must say I enjoy Bill Brysons writing, and have read the Small Island & Down Under books - had a good laugh at his humour in both. He paints such an accurate picture.

I really laughed at this from the article though :
"But really what passport channel he staggers through is an irrelevance: the guy even likes Marmite "

muppetking

Wonderful.........thank you Baloo! Take note some of those bitter, twisted, would be expats