The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Woodsman Spare That Country

Bill Bryson is the stand-up comedian of travel writing. The Road to Little Dribbling is an update on his first act, Notes From a Small Island, of 20 years before. The style of loving sarcasm is the same. With the narrative sense of David Sedaris and the one-liner punch of Jackie Mason, he renews one's faith yet again in the raw wit and humour available in Britain and most importantly the British willingness to apply that wit and humour to themselves. It is impossible to read his explanation of things like the British road numbering system or post code designations without falling in a heap. The throw away lines like "The [ancient humanoid] Happisburgh people were not like modern humans. They weren’t even like John Prescott." demand to be read aloud to one's spouse or any sentient being you happen to be sitting next to on the bus. And make no mistake: Bryson is a Brit writing for the British.

Bryson and I have been channeling each other since we both fetched up in pre-Thatcherite Britain from America in the early 1970's when houses were cheap, plumbers were bolshie, post offices were in every village and the M25 was yet a distant dream. We share the overly sentimental opinion that Britain reached its peak of societal perfection sometime in 1975 because of these very things. Neither of us could bear to be separated from this island haven. So we found ourselves a couple of NHS nurses in anticipation of old age and settled into a routine of blissful exceptionality that was then afforded to Americans who were forgiven almost any social ineptitude simply because there weren't all that many of them around and they were moderately quaint in a colonial sort of way.

Both Bryson and I also delayed applying for British citizenship for about 40 years - I suspect because when we first arrived no one was particularly interested in how long we might stay or if we were employed or not. In my case a lovely woman knocked on my door my first week in the country to ask if I would like to be inscribed in the electoral roll. So never having been made to feel like an 'alien' as the Americans say, there didn't seem to be much point in formal citizenship. This was of course before the rise of terrorism...or Donald Trump.

And our appreciation of Britain follows a similar script: there may be decrepitude in Britain but this is somehow quaint, or at least limited in scope compared with the US. Britain's bucolic beauty is incomparable - never overwhelming but always profound. Britain, unlike the USA, layers its history rather than levelling everything to new foundations, a fact which is apparent whether one is roaming London streets or gazing over a Cotswolds vista. Nothing seems to entirely disappear: the Roman road has become a farm track; the 16th C toll road is now a quiet lane outside one's house, the 18th C post road is the a largely unused A road which has now been superseded by the motorway. Indeed it is a place wherein the centuries blent and blurred as Rupert Brooke claimed. And it is this physical continuity, which is a consequence of what Bryson calls ‘happy accidents’, that is most appreciated by Americans (well at least two of them) and least noticed by cradle-Brits.

Britain, like its former empire, is an largely unintentional place. It is this apparent un-intentionality that perhaps makes Britain British (or England English if the Scots, Welsh, Cornish, and Irish object). As Bryson knows "The first principle of a British system is that it should only appear systematic." From common law to the common land parks of London, the entire culture is the result of fortuitous muddle rather than programme. Britons take this entirely for granted, but it continues to fascinate Bryson (and me).

The physical continuity available in Britain certainly fills a cultural lacuna of mine, having grown up in the New York City of Robert Moses, the primary characteristic of which was its periodic mass destruction throughout the 20th c. What worries Bryson is that the very unawareness by the British of this historical treasure is the most significant threat to its continued existence. Britain is, unintentionally but fortunately, a theme park of not just Western but Anglo-Asian, Anglo-African, Anglo-Caribbean and, perhaps disturbingly, Anglo-American culture.

Disturbing because it is a culture that is vulnerable to the kind of financial power that exists in the hands of modern day moguls who have the resources to destroy it systematically. In a sense it was only the lack of a Donald Trump (or a Robert Moses) which prevented the London Redevelopment Plan of the early 1970’s from destroying the history, as well as most of the charm, of the city. If anything this vulnerability is even more acute in small towns and in the countryside whose aesthetic ecology is always on a knife edge of development by Big Money which is behind the (now post-Brexit questionable) High Speed Rail Line between London and Birmingham and additional runways at either Gatwick or Heathrow. These are properly national not local issues in Britain. This is the serious point of Bryson's wonderfully entertaining book: Britain, especially physical Britain, is too precious to lose accidentally.

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