The Road to Little Dribbling
Bill Bryson
Doubleday, £20

Bill Bryson’s love affair with Britain began, forty-odd years ago, with Branston pickle. Eating his first grated cheese sandwich – “ I had never seen a dairy product distressed before serving” – with a dollop of revolting-looking condiment on the side, he discovered to his surprise that it was delicious. “Gradually it dawned on me that I had found a country that was wholly strange to me and yet somehow marvellous. It is a feeling that has never left me.”
His first homage to his adopted isles came with Notes from a Small Island, in 1995. To mark the anniversary of that piquant travelogue, which hared around the shires in Bryson’s peculiarly tortoise like manner, he revisits the concept, though trying – not too scrupulously – to avoid the places he encountered on the original journey.
This time, he has drawn what he calls the Bryson Line, running from Bognor Regis on the English Channel to Cape Wrath, where the Atlantic meets the North Sea, whose waters, he learns, are the “liveliest in the world”. In a series of fits and starts, and with many a detour, he advances along this self-imposed route via Mousehole in Cornwall, Skegness in Lincolnshire and Keswick in Cumbria, to name but a few. Wales is included almost as an afterthought, receiving a single chapter, and once into Scotland, after tiptoeing over the border as far as North Berwick, he is summoned home to the south to deal with a legal suit he has filed. Thereafter, he catapults himself to Inverness by overnight train, thereby missing out most of the country.
This, then, is essentially a footnote to his idea of England, with Scotland and Wales acting like topographical cress, as a garnish. Northern Ireland, meanwhile, remains but a distant view on the horizon. The nationally sensitive might feel aggrieved, but since a reader would have to be tone-deaf not to appreciate where Bryson’s heart beats most strongly, it makes sense. Though the Iowan has only recently taken out British citizenship, he is as English in his predilections, prejudices and sensibilities as one who can trace his ancestry back to Piers the Ploughman.
Thus he sets off in the wake of Daniel Defoe, H V Morton, Paul Theroux and his younger self, to take the temperature of Britain, and in the process discover his own changing outlook. As the title suggests, mortality looms over the enterprise, his advancing age and flourishing nasal hair a harbinger of things to come. There is no sense that this is a last jaunt – Bryson is as spirited as ever – but there is an autumnal mood to his contemplations, and he seems to be laying down his position on his most cherished subjects as if stocking the pantry with jams and chutneys ahead of the cold months to come.
Nobody knows better than Bryson the importance of personality to travel writing. A less skilful or characterful narrator could make this sort of trip deadly. Bryson, however, salts the page with his pet grievances and passions, among them the indefensible blight of creeping development on the green belt; his loathing of stupidity or officiousness in young and old, and the National Trust in particular; and his horror at people’s lack of aesthetic awareness. He cannot praise Britain’s countryside highly enough, however, or the nation’s tolerance, cheeriness and lack of greed. Nor the astounding wealth of history that lies all around. “There isn’t anywhere in the world with more to look at in a smaller space”.
Inevitably there are longueurs, as on the dreich day when he visits Aberystwyth where, beyond splashing through puddles, nothing worth writing about happens. This, sadly, is the downside of his day-tripper style, of alighting only fleetingly on most of his destinations. But usually, even on slow days, this former journalist draws on his fascination with history, geography and trivia to make himself not just an entertaining but often informative companion. Where he knows a place well – such as London, East Anglia, or Yorkshire – his reflections carry more heft. But since Bryson has moulded for himself a niche where hyperbole and harrumphing carry him lightly across most terrains, we go to him less for insights – though there are plenty of these – and more for the pleasure of his company. And he can be very funny indeed. Almost every page has a line worth quoting, his ideas seeming to emerge naturally in aphoristic shape.
He can be astute as well as droll. “The British really are the only people in the world who become genuinely enlivened when presented with a hot beverage and a small plain biscuit.” And for the most part, he thinks we are a contented lot. Yet his idyllic image of a United Kingdom suffered a dent long before the referendum, when watching a football match, years ago, in an Aberfeldy pub. England was playing Italy, but when England scored, his were the only arms that shot up in the air. When Italy found the back of the net, the place erupted. “I was severely unsettled by this,” he recalls. Previously, he had always dutifully tried to support the rest of the home nations. After this he thinks, “‘F*** ’em. I hope they struggle to beat Malta.’ Amazingly often, I get my wish.”
As his journey is approaching its finale, he reaches North Berwick, where he has a disconcerting moment in a pub when he gets in the way of another customer. Old scars clearly return to haunt him. “That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead.”