Notes From A Small Island Quotes

I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, 'Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!' Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I'll tell you that.

And I find chopsticks frankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?

The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn't been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

I like being in a country where when cows attack, word of it gets around. That’s what I mean when I say Britain is cozy.

Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.

To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright

When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.

Nothing gives the English more pleasure, in a quiet but determined sort of way, than to do things oddly.

By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.

The way I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement.

Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. What a wondrous place this was - crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? ('Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.') What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course. How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state - in short, did nearly everything right - and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that 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 the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.

I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans, according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so it was clear that my people needed me." --On his move back to America after living in England for twenty years.

Among the many thousands of things that I have never been able to understand, one in particular stands out. That is the question of who was the first person who stood by a pile of sand and said, “You know, I bet if we took some of this and mixed it with a little potash and heated it, we could make a material that would be solid and yet transparent. We could call it glass.” Call me obtuse, but you could stand me on a beach till the end of time and never would it occur to me to try to make it into windows.

It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.

There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us.

We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote and forbidding that even the sheep were startled to see us.

England?” she said with unreserved amazement. “Why do you live in England?” “Because it is nothing like Indianapolis

To say that Windermere is popular with boaters is to flirt recklessly with understatement.

We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.

I wondered idly what the builders of Stonehenge would have created if they’d had bulldozers and big trucks for moving materials and computers to help them design. What would they have created if they had had all the tools we have? Then I crested the brow of the hill with a view down to the visitor center, with its café and gift shop, its land trains and giant parking lot, and realized I was almost certainly looking at it.

The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it’s not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.

We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too.

The patients on Tuke Ward were a pleasant and tractable bunch and practised insanity with a certain elan.

I somberly reflected that the history of the Highlands is five hundred years of cruelty and bloodshed followed by two hundred years of way too much bagpipe music.

We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That

When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke's commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.

...it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see--that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this--at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow's Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his "Elegy," the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?

America has given us a pretty decent modern world and doesn’t always get enough thanks for that. But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where

Ah,” he said in a tone of genial wisdom, “a chancellor is rather like a bidet. Everyone is pleased to have one, but no one knows quite what they are for.” A chancellor is nominally the head of a university, but in practice has no role, no power, no purpose.

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law.

Returning to my book, I learned that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. It was a wonderful evening.

Calais is an interesting place that exists solely for the purpose of giving English people in shell suits somewhere to go for the day.

Only twenty-six British universities have total endowments greater than the amount given annually to the Ohio State University football team. I

I am so well prepared financially that I have money in a range of currencies that no longer exist. I

It is an interesting experience to become acquainted with a country through the eyes of the insane, and, if I may say so, a particularly useful grounding for life in Britain.

Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets, the poorer it thinks itself. All

I sat there for some time, a young man with more on his mind than in it.

Here are instructions for being a pigeon: (1) Walk around aimlessly for a while, pecking at cigarette butts and other inappropriate items. (2) Take fright at someone walking along the platform and fly off to a girder. (3) Have a shit. (4) Repeat.

It was like being in the midst of an ugly-building competition. For the better part of a decade architects had been arriving in the area and saying, “You think that’s bad? Wait’ll you see what I can do!

Do you like that?" I'll say in surprise since it doesn't seem like her type of thing, and she'll look at me as if I'm mad. That!?" She'll say, "No, it's hideous" Then why on earth," I always want to say, "did you walk all the way over there to touch it?" but of course...I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say... Read more - "I'm hungry", "I'm bored", "My feet are tired", "Yes, that one looks nice on you too", "Well, have both of them", "Oh, for fuck sake", "Can't we just go home", "Monsoon? Again? Oh for fuck sake", "then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?" - it doesn't pay, so I say nothing.

I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.

There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names—Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician—but that the one epoch that everybody knows about is named for the Jura Mountains in France, even though the Dorset coast is actually the best place in the world to see Jurassic outcrops.

Blenheim Palace, home of the Dukes of Marlborough, whose achievements over the last eleven generations could be inscribed with a Sharpie on the side of a peanut.

beyond a network of pedestrian tunnels and over a large open space shared by parking lots and those strange new-town trees that never seem to grow.

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. Afterward

I quite like Torquay and might one day come back, but I can tell you this now: where watch batteries are concerned, they can go fuck themselves.

In Iowa, we were not used to seeing the houses of well-known people on account of there were no well-known people in Iowa.

There is almost no area of British life that isn’t touched with a kind of genius for names.

Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water),

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,

It was full of lazy late-afternoon shadows and an impossible green lushness such as could only be appreciated by someone freshly arrived

And so one more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along hem of the mountains...

here is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell “disappointed” even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level. Trawling

Impulsively, I lumbered aboard, bought a ticket, and took a seat toward the back. The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.

Oh, go on' you prod encouragingly. 'Well, just a small one then,' they say and dartingly take a small one, and then get a look as if they have just done something terribly devilish. All this is completely alien to the American mind. To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright. You might as well say 'Oh, I shouldn't really' if someone tells you to take a deep breath.

What a joy walking is. All the cares of life, all the hopeless, inept fuckwits that God has strewn along the Bill Bryson Highway of Life, suddenly seem far away and harmless, and the world becomes tranquil and welcoming and good. And to walk with old friends multiplies the pleasure a hundredfold.

Durham Cathedral, like all great buildings of antiquity, is essentially just a giant pile of rubble held in place by two thin layers of dressed stone. But—and here is the truly remarkable thing—because that gloopy mortar was contained between two impermeable outer layers, air couldn’t get to it, so it took a very long time—forty years to be precise—to dry out. As it dried, the whole structure gently settled, which meant that the cathedral masons had to build doorjambs, lintels, and the like at slightly acute angles so that they would ease over time into the correct alignments. And that’s exactly what happened. After forty years of slow-motion sagging, the building settled into a position of impeccable horizontality, which it has maintained ever since. To me, that is just amazing—the idea that people would have the foresight and dedication to ensure a perfection that they themselves might never live to see.

Several of the houses have been mildly disfigured by the careless addition of electrical wires to their façades (something that other less intellectually distracted nations would put inside) but never mind.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology. It

Thank you,” I said and then abruptly leaned across the counter and with two forked fingers poked him sharply in the eyes. Actually, I didn’t do that. I just imagined it. But imagining it made me feel better. I

I passed the time browsing in the windows of the many tourists shops that stand along it, reflecting on what a lot of things the Scots have given the world—kilts, bagpipes, tam-o’-shanters, tins of oatcakes, bright yellow sweaters with big diamond patterns, sacks of haggis—and how little anyone but a Scot would want them. Let

no small achievement when you consider the British climate, the fact that Blackpool is ugly, dirty and a long way from anywhere, that its sea is an open toilet, and its attractions nearly all cheap, provincial and dire.

There is no question that a Neanderthal could easily beat us up. So, too, presumably could their women, which may be why we are only 2 percent Neanderthal instead of 50 percent. Those bitches were too scary for us. Nearby

I took a train to Liverpool. they were having a festival when I arrived. Citizens had taken time off from their busy activities to add crisp packets, empty cigarette boxes and carrier-bags to the other wise bland and neglected landscape.

One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.

For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest – I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People – but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.

This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, ‘That’s £4.20, love,’ or whatever, they suddenly look as if they’ve never done this sort of thing before. They go ‘Oh!’ and start rooting in a flustered fashion in their handbag for their purse or chequebook, as if no-one had told them that this might happen.

The Greater London Development Plan would have cost a then-colossal £2 billion, making it the biggest public investment ever made in Britain. That was its salvation. Britain couldn’t afford it. In the end, the visionaries were undone by the unmanageable scale of their own ambitions. It

Coming from a country where mapmakers tend to exclude any landscape feature smaller than, say, Pike’s Peak, I am constantly impressed by the richness of detail on the OS 1:25,000 series. They include every wrinkle and divot of the landscape, every barn, milestone, wind pump and tumulus. They distinguish between sand pits and gravel pits and between power lines strung from pylons and power lines strung from poles. This one even included the stone seat on which I sat now. It astounds me to be able to look at a map and know to the square metre where my buttocks are deployed.

Somebody needs to explain to me why it is that the one thing your body can suddenly do well when you get old is grow hair in your nose and ears. It’s like God is playing a terrible, cruel joke on you, as if he is saying, “Well, Bill, the bad news is that from now on you are going to be barely continent, lose your faculties one by one, and have sex about once every lunar eclipse, but the good news is that you can braid your nostrils.

Out of all the incursions, the only permanent one so far is the present one, and that dates from just twelve thousand years ago, which means that Britain is actually one of the more recent places in the world to become inhabited by modern people. In this sense it is much younger than the Americas or Australia. The

I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness, and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don’t even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.) As I read the magazine, I kept hearing a voice in my head, like the voice from a 1950s B-movie trailer, saying: “They came from Planet Imbecile!

It took 500 men just to pull each sarsen, plus 100 more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk 600 people into helping you drag a 50-ton stone 18 miles across the countryside, muscle it into an upright position and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.

The positive side of thinking you are about to die is that it does make you glad of the little life that is left to you.

She had, I realized, Retail Tourette’s Syndrome, a compulsion to blurt advice. There was nothing she could do about it.

nostalgia such as can be known only by those who remember the days of hot metal typesetting and noisy composing rooms

wondering how many tens of thousands of days have passed since BBC One last showed a program that anyone not on medication would want to watch.

Never has anyone milked a single thought more vigorously and successfully than he did. The line for which he is remembered was “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” still known as Parkinson’s Law. It was first elucidated in a comic essay he wrote for The Economist in 1955 while he was a professor at the University of Malaya in Singapore.

I have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing - by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged background so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have never been able to decide whether that is deeply impressive or just appalling - whether this is a country where engine drivers know about Tintoretto and Leibniz or a country where people who know about Tintoretto and Leibniz end up driving engines. All I know is that it exists more here than anywhere else.

I remember once reading that the tenth Duke of Marlborough, on a visit to one of his daughter’s homes, announced in consternation from the top of the stairs that his toothbrush wasn’t foaming properly. It turned out that his valet had always put toothpaste on his brush for him, and as a consequence the duke was unaware that dental implements didn’t foam up spontaneously. I rest my case.

They were all women’s magazines, but they weren’t like the magazines my mother and sister read. The articles in my mother’s and sister’s magazines were always about sex and personal gratification. They had titles like “Eat Your Way to Multiple Orgasms,” “Office Sex—How to Get It,” “Tahiti: The Hot New Place for Sex,” and “Those Shrinking Rain Forests—Are They Any Good for Sex?” The British magazines addressed more modest aspirations. They had titles like “Knit Your Own Twin Set,” “Money-Saving Button Offer,” “Make This Super Knitted Soap-Saver,” and “Summer’s Here—It’s Time for Mayonnaise!

And it is all the more extraordinary when you reflect that despite perpetually modest funding Britain still has three of the world’s top ten universities and eleven of the top one hundred. Put another way, Britain has 1 percent of the world’s population, but 11 percent of its best universities, and accounts for nearly 12 percent of total academic citations and 16 percent of the most highly cited studies. I

What a wonderful world that was, and how remote it seems now. It is a challenge to believe that there was ever a time that airline food was exciting, when stewardesses were happy to see you, when flying was such an occasion that you wore your finest clothes. I grew up in a world in which everything was like that: shopping malls, TV dinners, TV itself, supermarkets, freeways, air conditioning, drive-in movies, 3D movies, transistor radios, backyard barbecues, air travel as a commonplace—all were brand-new and marvelously exciting. It is amazing we didn’t choke to death on all the novelty and wonder in our lives. I remember once my father brought home a device that you plugged in and, with an enormous amount of noise and energy, it turned ice cubes into shaved ice, and we got excited about that. We were idiots really, but awfully happy, too. —

Jennings quotes the response of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA competition when asked to explain why so many Americans couldn’t even find their own country on a map. With solemnity and conviction she responded: I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don’t have maps, and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.

It’s a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces.

FOR SOME TIME, I have believed that everyone should be allowed to have, say, ten things that they dislike without having to justify or explain to anyone why they don’t like them. Reflex loathings, I call them. Mine are: Power walkers. Those vibrating things restaurants give you to let you know when a table is ready. Television programs in which people bid on the contents of locked garages. All pigeons everywhere, at all times. Lawyers, too. Douglas Brinkley, a minor academic and sometime book reviewer whose powers of observation and generosity of spirit would fit comfortably into a proton and still leave room for an echo. Color names like taupe and teal that don’t mean anything. Saying that you are going to “reach out” to someone when what you mean is that you are going to call or get in touch with them. People who give their telephone number so rapidly at the end of long phone messages that you have to listen over and over and eventually go and get someone else to come and listen with you, and even then you still can’t get it. Nebraska. Mispronouncing “buoy.” The thing that floats in a navigation channel is not a “boo-ee.” It’s a “boy.” Think about it. Would you call something that floats “boo-ee-ant”? Also, in a similar vein, pronouncing Brett Favre’s last name as if the “r” comes before the “v.” It doesn’t, so stop it. Hotel showers that don’t give any indication of which way is hot and which cold. All the sneaky taxes, like “visitor tax” and “hospitality tax” and “fuck you because you’re from out of town tax,” that are added to hotel bills. Baseball commentators who get bored with the game by about the third inning and start talking about their golf game or where they ate last night. Brett Favre. I know that is more than ten, but this is my concept, so I get some bonus ones.

It met its target, a remarkable accomplishment, but here’s the thing. According to the 2014 Times Higher Education world rankings (which are generally held to be the most exacting of their type), the University of Virginia ranks 130th among the world’s universities. Eighteen much more modestly funded British universities rank higher. On the world stage, according to the Times Higher, Virginia is about level with Britain’s Lancaster University, which has an endowment fund one-thousandth the size of Virginia’s. That is pretty extraordinary. And

Everything on offer was robustly Scottish and not in the least appealing to someone from Iowa. (I believe I can speak for my entire state on this.) The dinner options featured a plate of haggis, neeps and tatties, and the snacks included Tunnock’s teacake, haggis-flavored potato chips, and Mrs. Tilly’s Scottish Tablet, which sounded to me not at all like a food but more like something you would put in a tub of warm water and immerse sore feet in. I would imagine it makes a fizzing sound and produces streams of ticklish bubbles. The drinks were all Scottish, too, even the water. I ordered a Tennent’s lager. It

I HAD TO GO to America for a while to give some talks. Going to America always does me good. It’s where I’m from, after all. There’s baseball on the TV, people are friendly and upbeat, they don’t obsess about the weather except when there is weather worth obsessing about, you can have all the ice cubes you want. Above all, visiting America gives me perspective. Consider two small experiences I had upon arriving at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas. When I checked in, the clerk needed to record my details, naturally enough, and asked for my home address. Our house doesn’t have a street number, just a name, and I have found in the past that that is more deviance than an American computer can sometimes cope with, so I gave our London address. The girl typed in the building number and street name, then said: “City?” I replied: “London.” “Can you spell that please?” I looked at her and saw that she wasn’t joking. “L-O-N-D-O-N,” I said. “Country?” “England.” “Can you spell that?” I spelled England. She typed for a moment and said: “The computer won’t accept England. Is that a real country?” I assured her it was. “Try Britain,” I suggested. I spelled that, too—twice (we got the wrong number of T’s the first time)—and the computer wouldn’t take that either. So I suggested Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, and GB, but those were all rejected, too. I couldn’t think of anything else to suggest. “It’ll take France,” the girl said after a minute. “I beg your pardon?” “You can have ‘London, France.’ ” “Seriously?” She nodded. “Well, why not?” So she typed “London, France,” and the system was happy. I finished the check-in process and went with my bag and plastic room key to a bank of elevators a few paces away. When the elevator arrived, a young woman was in it already, which I thought a little strange because the elevator had come from one of the upper floors and now we were going back up there again. About five seconds into the ascent, she said to me in a suddenly alert tone: “Excuse me, was that the lobby back there?” “That big room with a check-in desk and revolving doors to the street? Why, yes, it was.” “Shoot,” she said and looked chagrined. Now I am not for a moment suggesting that these incidents typify Austin, Texas, or America generally or anything like that. But it did get me to thinking that our problems are more serious than I had supposed. When functioning adults can’t identify London, England, or a hotel lobby, I think it is time to be concerned. This is clearly a global problem and it’s spreading. I am not at all sure how we should tackle such a crisis, but on the basis of what we know so far, I would suggest, as a start, quarantining Texas.

Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world’s most terrifying human had he but been human. I don’t know quite what he was, other than it was five feet six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby T-shirt. Reliable rumor had it that he had not been born, but burst fully formed from his mother’s belly and then skittered off to the sewers.

We have now reached a level in which many people are not merely unacquainted with the fundamentals of punctuation, but don’t evidently realize that there are fundamentals. Many people—people who make posters for leading publishers, write captions for the BBC, compose letters and advertisements for important institutions—seem to think that capitalization and marks of punctuation are condiments that you sprinkle through any collection of words as if from a salt shaker. Here is a headline, exactly as presented, from a magazine ad for a private school in York: “Ranked by the daily Telegraph the top Northern Co-Educational day and Boarding School for Academic results.” All those capital letters are just random. Does anyone really think that the correct rendering of the newspaper is “the daily Telegraph”? Is it really possible to be that unobservant? Well, yes, as a matter of fact. Not long ago, I received an e-mail from someone at the Department for Children, Schools and Families asking me to take part in a campaign to help raise appreciation for the quality of teaching in Great Britain. Here is the opening line of the message exactly as it was sent to me: “Hi Bill. Hope alls well. Here at the Department of Children Schools and Families…” In the space of one line, fourteen words, the author has made three elemental punctuation errors (two missing commas, one missing apostrophe; I am not telling you more than that) and gotten the name of her own department wrong—this from a person whose job is to promote education. In a similar spirit, I received a letter not long ago from a pediatric surgeon inviting me to speak at a conference. The writer used the word “children’s” twice in her invitation, spelling it two different ways and getting it wrong both times. This was a children’s specialist working in a children’s hospital. How long do you have to be exposed to a word, how central must it be to your working life, to notice how it is spelled?

Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead. Beneath it was a photo of me-my most recent school photo. “Oh, no.” My heart filling with dread, I took the paper from Mr. Smith’s hands. “Couldn’t they have found a better picture?” Mr. Smith looked at me sharply. “Miss Oliviera,” he said, his gray eyebrows lowered. “I realize it’s all the rage with you young people today to toss off flippant one-liners so you can get your own reality television shows. But I highly doubt MTV will be coming down to Isla Huesos to film you in the Underworld. So that can’t be all you have to say about this.” He was right, of course. Though I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, because John was in the room, and I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he already did. But what I wanted to do was burst into tears. “Is that about Pierce?” John looked uneasy. Outside, thunder rumbled again. This time, it sounded even closer than before. “Yes, of course, it is, John,” Mr. Smith said. There was something strange about his voice. He sounded almost as if he were mad at John. Only why would he be? John had done the right thing. He’d explained about the Furies. “What did you expect? Have you gotten to the part about the reward your father is offering for information leading to your safe return, Miss Oliviera?” My gaze flicked down the page. I wanted to throw up. “One million dollars?” My dad’s company, one of the largest providers in the world of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries, was valued at several hundred times that. “That cheapskate.” This was all so very, very bad. “One million dollars is a lot of money to most people.” Mr. Smith said, with a strong emphasis on most people. He still had that odd note in his voice. “Though I recognize that money may mean little to a resident of the Underworld. So I’d caution you to use judiciousness, wherever it is that you’re going, as there are many people on this island who’ll be more than willing to turn you in for only a small portion of that reward money. I don’t suppose I might ask where you’re going? Or suggest that you pay a call on your mother, who is beside herself with worry?” “That’s a good idea,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I felt much better already. I could straighten out this whole thing with a single conversation. “I should call my mom-“ Both Mr. Smith’s cry of alarm and the fact that John grabbed me by the wrist as I was reaching into my book bag for my cell phone stopped me from making calls of any sort. “You can’t use you phone,” Mr. Smith said. “The police-and your father-are surely waiting for you to do just that. They’ll triangulate on the signal from the closest cell tower, and find you.” When I stared at him for his use of the word triangulate, Mr. Smith shook his head and said, “My partner, Patrick, is obsessed with Law & Order reruns.

But for reasons that genuinely escape me, it has also become spectacularly accommodating to stupidity. Where this thought most recently occurred to me was in a hotel coffee shop in Baltimore, where I was reading the local paper, the Sun, and I saw a news item noting that Congress had passed a law prohibiting the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services from funding research that might lead, directly or indirectly, to the introduction of gun controls. Let me repeat that but in slightly different words. The government of the United States refuses to let academics use federal money to study gun violence if there is a chance that they might find a way of reducing the violence. It isn’t possible to be more stupid than that. If you took all the commentators from FOX News and put them together in a room and told them to come up with an idea even more pointlessly idiotic, they couldn’t do it. Britain isn’t like that, and thank goodness. On tricky and emotive issues like gun control, abortion, capital punishment, the teaching of evolution in schools, the use of stem cells for research, and how much flag waving you have to do in order to be considered acceptably patriotic, Britain is calm and measured and quite grown up, and for me that counts for a great deal. —

There are certain things that you have to be British, or at least older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: skiffle music, salt-cellars with a single hole, Marmite (an edible yeast extract with the visual properties of an industrial lubricant), Gracie Fields singing “Sally,” George Formby doing anything, jumble sales, making sandwiches from bread you’ve sliced yourself, really milky tea, boiled cabbage, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonably fun day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, erecting windbreaks on a beach (why, pray, are you there if you need a windbreak?), and cricket. There may be one or two others that don’t occur to me at the moment.

One night, around the campfire after a dinner of bully-beef stew, someone opened an extra bottle of rum. ‘As it grew darker, the men began to sing, at first slightly self-conscious and shy, but picking up confidence as the song spread.’ Their songs were not the martial chants of warriors, but the schmaltzy romantic popular tunes of the time: ‘I’ll Never Smile Again’, ‘My Melancholy Baby’, ‘I’m Dancing with Tears in My Eyes’. The bigger and burlier the singer, Pleydell noted, the more passionate and heartfelt the singing. Now the French contingent struck up, with a warbling rendition of ‘Madeleine’, the bittersweet song of a man whose lilacs for his lover have been left to wilt in the rain. Then it was the turn of the German prisoners who, after some debate, belted out ‘Lili Marleen’, the unofficial anthem of the Afrika Korps, complete with harmonies: ‘Vor der Kaserne / Vor dem grossen Tor / Stand eine Laterne / Und steht sie noch davor …’ (Usually rendered in English as: Underneath the lantern, by the barrack gate, darling I remember, how you used to wait.) As the last verse died away, the audience broke into loud whistles and applause. To his own astonishment, Pleydell was profoundly moved. ‘There was something special about that night,’ he wrote years later. ‘We had formed a small solitary island of voices; voices which faded and were caught up in the wilderness. A little cluster of men singing in the desert. An expression of feeling that defied the vastness of its surroundings … a strange body of men thrown together for a few days by the fortunes of war.’ The doctor from Lewisham had come in search of authenticity, and he had found it deep in the desert, among hard soldiers singing sentimental songs to imaginary sweethearts in three languages.

The prize item of the house is Jane’s small round writing table, where all her books were scratched out. A group of Japanese visitors were gathered around it now, discussing it in low, reverential whispers, which is something I find the Japanese do exceptionally well. Nobody gets more out of a few low grunts and a couple of rounded vowel sounds stretched out and spoken as if in surprise or consternation. They can carry on the most complex conversations, covering the full range of human emotions—surprise, enthusiasm, hearty endorsement, bitter disagreement—in a tone that sounds awfully like someone trying to have an orgasm quietly. I followed them from room to room, enthralled by their conversation, until I realized that I was becoming part of it, and that they were casting glances at me with something like unease, so I bowed apologetically and left them to admire an old fireplace with low moans of expressive rapture.

read as to eat. I was greatly taken with this new way of talking and derived considerable pleasure from speaking it to the waiter. I asked him for a luster of water freshly drawn from the house tap and presented au nature in a cylinder of glass, and when he came around with the bread rolls I entreated him to present me a tonged rondelle of blanched wheat, oven baked and masked in a poppy-seed coating. I was just getting warmed up to this and about to ask for a fanned lap coverlet, freshly laundered and scented with a delicate hint of Lemon Daz, to replace the one that had slipped from my lap and now lay recumbent on the horizontal walking surface subjacent to my feet, when he handed me a card that said “Sweets Menu” and I realized that we were back in the no-nonsense world of English. It’s a funny thing about English diners. They’ll let you dazzle them with piddly duxelles of this and fussy little noisettes of that, but don’t mess with their puddings,

There are really only two ways to get hit on the head by a parking barrier. One is to stand underneath a raised barrier and purposely allow it to fall on you. That is the easy way, obviously. The other method—and this is where a little diminished mental capacity can go a long way—is to forget the barrier you have just seen rise, step into the space it has vacated and stand with lips pursed while considering your next move, and then be taken completely by surprise as it slams down on your head like a sledgehammer on a spike.

THE WAY I see it, there are three reasons never to be unhappy. First, you were born. This in itself is a remarkable achievement. Did you know that each time your father ejaculated (and frankly he did it quite a lot) he produced roughly twenty-five million spermatozoa – enough to repopulate Britain every two days or so? For you to have been born, not only did you have to be among the few batches of sperm that had even a theoretical chance of prospering – in itself quite a long shot – but you then had to win a race against 24,999,999 or so other wriggling contenders, all rushing to swim the English Channel of your mother’s vagina in order to be the first ashore at the fertile egg of Boulogne, as it were. Being born was easily the most remarkable achievement of your whole life. And think: you could just as easily have been a flatworm. Second, you are alive. For the tiniest moment in the span of eternity you have the miraculous privilege to exist. For endless eons you were not. Soon you will cease to be once more. That you are able to sit here right now in this one never-to-be-repeated moment, reading this book, eating bon-bons, dreaming about hot sex with that scrumptious person from accounts, speculatively sniffing your armpits, doing whatever you are doing – just existing – is really wondrous beyond belief. Third, you have plenty to eat, you live in a time of peace and ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ will never be number one again.