Welcome, Bill Bryson, to Salut!s unashamed tendency to write about books when it comes across them, not necessarily when they first come out ...
Bill Bryson, on his own candid admission, is something of a curmudgeon. That is not all we have in common. We both worked for newspapers, local and national, and became rather pedantic about aspects of our trade. We enjoy the English countryside, beer (though, being American, he is more of a lager fan than I could ever be), Indian food and sport (he'd say sports).
There our similarities more or less end. Although we both write for a living, he does so with huge and deserved success, and I do not.
His 1996 book, Notes from a Small Island, describing his introduction to the UK as a young American backpacker starting inauspiciously in Dover, was and remains a bestseller. Other books have followed, as well as television programmes, lecture tours and a university chancellorship (in blessed Durham). He no longer needs to work for newspapers. I, meanwhile, struggle to complete my first book, a proper one as opposed to the single chapters contributed to a couple of compilations; I still file copy diligently to newspapers long after I ceased to be in their actual employment and the highest academic honour in County Durham that I can claim was being asked by my great friend Pete Sixsmith to talk to his sixth form liberal studies group about journalism.
Glance back a few lines and you will see that I mentioned that there were “more or less" no further similarities between us. But there is one more. What we also have in common is that we have both written for the Trip Advsior travel website. And my efforts have, in that very small and and unpaid corner of publishing, proved more successful than Bryson’s.
My offerings are the usual reflections you find at the site on the pros and cons of particular establishments, always restaurants – so far at any rate - in my case. They have all sailed onto Trip Advisor’s pages, though my very first item was put on hold until I had eliminated a direct quotation in French; it would have been readily understandable to non-French speakers but its very appearance on the English-language version of the site would breach style policy.
As Bryson relates in another of his delightful works, The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island, published last year to coincide with the approaching 20th anniversary of Notes Vol I, his encounter with Trip Advisor’s style police was not one as easily overcome as mine. In the manner of an agent or record company turning down The Beatles, and I feel sure there was one I have now forgotten, the site sacrificed an entirely free piece of writing from a bestselling author at the altar of ferocious attachment to policy.
Bryson has stayed at a hotel in the New Forest. He found it broadly acceptable without being exceptional. Later, one of the friends who had accompanied him forwarded a newspaper link showing the hotel had been heavily fined for not one instance but two of serious rat infestation in the kitchen. Bryson created a Trip Advisor account for the specific purpose of alerting readers who might otherwise be seduced by the many complimentary comments published about the hotel. Trip Advisor rejected his piece on the grounds that it did not meet its requirements for items to reflect first-hand experiences without citing "unverified" external references.
My thoughts turned often to Bryson and his more readily published writings during a short holiday in the Greek Islands last week.
I was reading his recent book and could not put it out of mind when the tour took us to Delos. Our old friend Wikipedia has it as one of the most important mythological, historical and archaeological sites in Greece, "a holy sanctuary for a millennium before Olympian Greek mythology made it the birthplace of Apollo and Artemis". It is just that a little mythological, historical and archaeological importance goes quite a long way for me.
Bryson appears to have limitless fascination for such matters; I felt the visit was, at two-and-three-quarter hours, a good 90 minutes too long. I realised there and then that a debt is owed to men like him by those of us less interested in ancient heaps of stones than by what they meant or came to mean to contemporary and ensuing societies. At Stonehenge and beyond, he does the legwork for us, conducting the painstaking inspection of sites, making energetic research, enduring the crowds and stumping up for overpriced tea and cake before writing about it all so entertainingly and informatively.
I heartily commend the new book. It is full of the fruits of Bryson’s hours of walking in lovely and sometimes little-known parts of the island he has come to adore.
There is still a lot he dislikes or finds incomprehensible about Britain; he gently mocks our steam railway enthusiasts (and train spotters), engages in or just imagines truculent exchanges with jobsworths who impede his progress around that island, people who allow their dogs to foul coastal paths and well-to-do customers who leave miserly tips even when served excellently. In Bryson’s ideal Britain, all yobs would be rounded up and humanely or otherwise disposed of and governments would be made to abandon short-sighted policies of all sorts.
As is the fate of most pedants, he occasionally comes a cropper. When he suggests whimsical a way of “getting Britain back on its feet again"), the final word of the phrase is surely tautologous. Even if he retorts that it wouldn’t be the first time Britain had been required to stage a recovery, we can remind him that the great American fondness for commas, even when arguably unnecessary, would require one to appear after “back” to support that meaning.
And when roundly abusing the acting chief sub-editor of The Times and fellow production journalists over some disagreement that occurred when he, too, worked for that newspaper, he confuses the back bench, which is where they would have been working, with the “Home News Desk” which, on most newspapers, is or was a quite different thing, the hub from which news editors would organise day-to-day coverage and forward the resulting work to the back bench.
These are minor quarrels. You, like me, will almost certainly emerge from this book knowing a little or a lot more about much of what is to be admired but it sometimes hidden in this small island or ours.
Oh, and Bill Bryson will feel the same pain I did when the Delos cafe - something of a monopoly amid all the stones - stung me for 17 euros for two glasses of orange juice, admittedly made from fresh, crushed fruit, and one slice of baklava (Greek cake).
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