Bill Bryson has the rare knack of being out of his depth wherever he goes – even (perhaps especially) in the land of his birth. This became all too apparent when, after nearly two decades in England, the world’s best-loved travel writer upped sticks with Mrs Bryson, little Jimmy et al. and returned to live in the country he had left as a youth.
Of course there were things Bryson missed about Blighty but any sense of loss was countered by the joy of rediscovering some of the forgotten treasures of his childhood: the glories of a New England autumn; the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts; and motel rooms where you can generally count on being awakened in the night by a piercing shriek and the sound of a female voice pleading, ‘Put the gun down, Vinnie, I’ll do anything you say.’
Whether discussing the dazzling efficiency of the garbage disposal unit, the exoticism of having your groceries bagged for you, the jaw-slackening direness of American TV or the smug pleasure of being able to eat your beef without having to wonder if when you rise from the table you will walk sideways into the wall, Bill Bryson brings his inimitable brand of bemused wit to bear on that strangest of phenomena – the American way of life.
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by Doubleday
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Black Swan edition published 1999
Black Swan edition reissued 2016
Copyright © Bill Bryson 1998
Illustrations by Alan Baker
The articles in this book first appeared in the Mail on Sunday’s Night & Day magazine between 6 October 1996 and 17 May 1998.
Bill Bryson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
A CIP catalogue for this book
is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409095729
ISBN 9781784161842
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Coming Home
Help!
Well, Doctor, I Was Just Trying to Lie Down . . .
Take Me Out to the Ball Park
Dumb and Dumber
Drug Culture
Mail Call
How to Have Fun at Home
Design Flaws
Wide-open Spaces
Rule Number 1: Follow All Rules
The Mysteries of Christmas
The Numbers Game
Room Service
Our Friend the Moose
Consuming Pleasures
Junk Food Heaven
Tales of the North Woods
Hail to the Chief
Life in a Cold Climate
Drowning in Red Tape
The Wasteland
Commercials, Commercials, Commercials
Friendly People
On the Hotline
Those Boring Foreigners
The Cupholder Revolution
Your Tax Form Explained
Warning: Anyone Having Fun Will Be Reported
The States Explained
The War on Drugs
Why No One Walks
Gardening with My Wife
Why Everyone Is Worried
A Failure to Communicate
Lost at the Movies
The Risk Factor
Ah, Summer!
Help for the Nondesignated Individual
Where Scotland Is, and Other Useful Tips
Dying Accents
Inefficiency Report
A Day at the Seaside
Splendid Irrelevancies
On Losing a Son
Highway Diversions
Snoopers at Work
How to Hire a Car
Fall in New England
A Slight Inconvenience
So Sue Me
The Great Indoors
A Visit to the Barbershop
Book Tours
Death Watch
The Best American Holiday
Deck the Halls
The Waste Generation
Shopping Madness
Of Missing Planes and Missing Fingers
Your New Computer
In Praise of Diners
Uniformly Awful
The Fat of the Land
The Sporting Life
Last Night on the Titanic
Fun in the Snow
The Flying Nightmare
Lost in Cyber Land
Hotel California
Enough Already
Stupidity News
Spinning the Truth
For Your Convenience
Old News
Sense of Humour Failure
The Accidental Tourist
What Makes an Englishman
About the Author
Also by Bill Bryson
Copyright
Bill Bryson’s acclaimed A Short History of Nearly Everything won the Aventis Prize for Science Books and the Descartes Science Communication Prize. He is much loved for his bestselling travel books, from The Lost Continent to Notes from a Small Island and Down Under, and he has also written books about language and Shakespeare. His latest bestsellers are a memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, and At Home: A Short History of Private Life.
Also by
The Lost Continent
Mother Tongue
Troublesome Words
Neither Here Nor There
Made in America
Notes from a Small Island (published in the USA as I'm a Stranger Here Myself)
A Walk in the Woods
Notes from a Big Country
Down Under (published in the USA as In a Sunburned Country
African Diary
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Shakespeare (Eminent Lives Series)
Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors
Icons of England
At Home
One Summer
The Road to Little Dribbling
I am deeply indebted to the following people for various expressions of kindness, patience, generosity and drink: Simon Kelner and all his dear, wonderful colleagues on Night & Day, including Tristan Davies, Kate Carr, Ian Johns, Rebecca Carswell and Nick Donaldson; Alan Baker for his ever-droll and inventive illustrations to the column; Patrick Janson-Smith, Marianne Velmans, Alison Tulett, Larry Finlay, Katrina Whone and Emma Dowson, among many, many others, at Transworld Publishers; my agent Carol Heaton; my old pal David Cook for yet another brilliant jacket; Allan Sherwin and Brian King for letting me write columns when I should have been doing work for them; and above all – way above all – my wife, Cynthia, and children, David, Felicity, Catherine and Sam, for so graciously letting me drag them into all this.
And a special thanks to little Jimmy, whoever he may be.
In the late summer of 1996 Simon Kelner, who is both an old friend and an exceptionally nice fellow, rang me up in New Hampshire and asked me if I would write a weekly column about America for the Mail on Sunday’s Night & Day magazine, to which he had recently been appointed editor.
At various times over the years Simon had persuaded me to do all kinds of work that I didn’t have time to do, but this was way out of the question.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I’m sorry. It’s just not possible.’
‘So can you start next week?’
‘Simon, you don’t seem to understand. I can’t do it.’
‘We thought we’d call it “Notes from a Big Country”.’
‘Simon, you’ll have to call it “Blank Space at the Start of the Magazine” because I cannot do it.’
‘Great,’ he said, but a trifle absently. I had the impression that he was doing something else at the time – reviewing models for a swimsuit issue would be my guess. In any case, he kept covering up the phone and issuing important editor-type instructions to other people in the vicinity.
‘So we’ll send you a contract,’ he went on when he came back to me.
‘No, Simon, don’t do that. I can’t write a weekly column for you. It’s as simple as that. Are you taking this in? Simon, tell me you are taking this in.’
‘Wonderful. I’m so pleased. Well, must run.’
‘Simon, please listen to me. I can’t do a weekly column. Just not possible. Simon, are you listening? Simon? Hello? Simon, are you there? Hello? Bugger.’
So here are seventy-eight columns from the first eighteen months of ‘Notes from a Big Country’. And the thing is, I really didn’t have time for this.
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he’s ready to see you, and you can’t go home again. For the last seventeen months I have been quietly, even gamely, reassessing point number three.
A year ago last May, after nearly two decades in England, I moved back to the States with my wife and children. Returning home after such an absence is a surprisingly unsettling business, a little like waking from a long coma. You quickly discover that time has wrought changes that leave you feeling mildly foolish and out of touch. You proffer hopelessly inadequate sums when making small purchases. You puzzle over vending machines and payphones, and are quite astounded to discover, by means of a stern grip on your elbow, that gas station road maps are no longer free.
In my case, the problem was intensified by the fact that I had left as a youth and was returning in middle age. All those things one does as an adult – take out mortgages, have children, accumulate pension plans, develop an interest in household wiring – I had only ever done in England. Things like furnaces and screened windows were, in an American context, the preserve of my father.
So finding myself suddenly in charge of an old New England home, with its mysterious pipes and thermostats, its temperamental garbage disposal and life-threatening automatic garage door, was both unnerving and rather exhilarating.
Moving home after many years away is like that in most respects – an odd blend of the comfortingly familiar and oddly unknown. It is disconcerting to find yourself so simultaneously in your element and out of it. I can enumerate all manner of minutiae that mark me out as an American – which of the fifty states has a unicameral legislature, what a squeeze play is in baseball, who played Captain Kangaroo on TV. I even know about two-thirds of the words to ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, which is more than some people who have sung it publicly.
But send me to the hardware store and even now I am totally lost. For months I had conversations with the sales clerk at our local True-Value that went something like this:
‘Hi. I need some of that stuff you fill holes in walls with. My wife’s people call it Polyfilla.’
‘Oh, you mean spackle.’
‘Very possibly. And I need some of those little plastic things that you use to hold screws in the wall when you put shelves up. I know them as Rawlplugs.’
‘Well, we call them anchors.’
‘I shall make a mental note of it.’
Really, I could hardly have felt more foreign if I had stood there dressed in lederhosen. All this was a shock to me. Although I was always very happy in Britain, I never stopped thinking of America as home, in the fundamental sense of the term. It was where I came from, what I really understood, the base against which all else was measured.
In a funny way nothing makes you feel more like a native of your own country than to live where nearly everyone is not. For twenty years being an American was my defining quality. It was how I was identified, differentiated. I even got a job on the strength of it once when, in a moment of youthful audacity, I asserted to a senior editor of The Times that I would be the only person on the staff who could reliably spell Cincinnati. (And it was so.)
Happily, there is a flipside to this. The many good things about America also took on a bewitching air of novelty. I was as dazzled as any foreigner by the famous ease and convenience of daily life, the giddying abundance of absolutely everything, the wondrous unfillable vastness of an American basement, the delight of encountering waitresses who seemed to be enjoying themselves, the curiously astounding notion that ice is not a luxury item.
As well, there has been the constant, unexpected joy of re-encountering those things I grew up with but had largely forgotten: baseball on the radio, the deeply satisfying whoing-bang slam of a screen door in summer, sudden run-for-your-life thunderstorms, really big snowfalls, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, insects that glow, air-conditioning on really hot days, Jell-o jelly with chunks of fruit in it (which nobody actually eats, but it’s nice just to have it there wobbling on your plate), the pleasingly comical sight of oneself in shorts. All that counts for a lot, in a strange way.
So, on balance, I was wrong. You can go home again. Just bring extra money for road maps and remember to ask for spackle.
The other day I called my computer helpline, because I needed to be made to feel ignorant by someone much younger than me, and the boyish-sounding person who answered told me he required the serial number on my computer before he could deal with me.
‘And where do I find that?’ I asked warily.
‘It’s on the bottom of the CPU functional disequilibrium unit,’ he said, or words of a similarly confounding nature.
This, you see, is why I don’t call my computer helpline very often. We haven’t been talking four seconds and already I can feel a riptide of ignorance and shame pulling me out into the icy depths of Humiliation Bay. Any minute now, I know with a sense of doom, he’s going to ask me how much RAM I have.
‘Is that anywhere near the TV-screen thingy?’ I ask helplessly.
‘Depends. Is your model the Z-40LX Multimedia HPii or the ZX46/2Y Chromium B-BOP?’
And so it goes. The upshot is that the serial number for my computer is engraved on a little metal plate on the bottom of the main control box – the one with the CD drawer that is kind of fun to open and shut. Now call me an idealistic fool, but if I were going to put an identifying number on every computer I sold and then require people to regurgitate that number each time they wanted to communicate with me, I don’t believe I would put it in a place that required the user to move furniture and get the help of a neighbour each time he wished to consult it. However, that is not my point.
My model number was something like CQ124765900-03312-DiP/22/4. So here is my point: Why? Why does my computer need a number of such breathtaking complexity? If every neutrino in the universe, every particle of matter between here and the furthest wisp of receding Big Bang gas, somehow acquired a computer from this company there would still be plenty of spare numbers under such a system.
Intrigued, I began to look at all the numbers in my life, and nearly every one of them was absurdly excessive. My Barclaycard number, for instance, has thirteen digits. That’s enough for almost two trillion potential customers. Who are they trying to kid? My Budget Rent-a-Car card has no fewer than seventeen digits. Even my local video shop appears to have 1.999 billion customers on its rolls (which may explain why L.A. Confidential is always out).
The most impressive by far is my Blue Cross/Blue Shield medical card – that is the card every American must carry if he doesn’t want to be left at an accident site – which not only identifies me as No. YGH475907018 00, but also as a member of Group 02368. Presumably, then, each group has a person in it with the same number as mine. You can almost imagine us having reunions.
Now all this is a long way of getting round to the main point of this discussion, which is that one of the great improvements in American life in the last twenty years is the advent of phone numbers that any fool can remember. Let me explain.
For complicated historical reasons, on American telephones all the punch buttons except 1 and 0 also come with three of the letters of the alphabet on them. Button 2 has ABC on it, button 3 has DEF, and so on.
A long time ago people realized that you could remember numbers more easily if you relied on the letters rather than the numbers. In my hometown of Des Moines, for instance, if you wanted to call time – or the talking clock as you people so charmingly term it – the official number was 244-5646, which of course no one could recall. But if you dialled BIG JOHN you got the same number, and everybody could remember that (except, curiously, my mother, who was a bit hazy on the Christian name part, and so generally ended up asking the time of strangers whom she had just woken, but that’s another story).
Then at some point in the last twenty years big businesses discovered that they could make everyone’s life easier, and generate lots of lucrative calls for themselves, if they based their numbers on catchy letter combinations. So now any time you make almost any call to a commercial enterprise you dial 1-800-FLY TWA, or 244-GET PIZZA, or whatever. Not many changes in the last twenty years have made life immeasurably better for simple folk like me, but this unquestionably has.
So while you, poor thing, are listening to a school-marmish voice telling you that the code for Chippenham is now 01724750, except with a four-figure number, when it is 9, I am eating pizza, booking airline tickets and feeling considerably less churlish about modern telecommunications.
Now here is my big idea. I think we should all have one number for everything. Mine, of course, would be 1-800-BILL. This number would do for everything – it would make my phone ring, it would appear on my cheques, it would adorn my passport, it would get me a video.
Of course, it would mean rewriting a lot of computer programs, but I’m sure it could be done. I intend to take it up with my own computer company, just as soon as I can get at that serial number again.
Here’s a fact for you. According to the latest Statistical Abstract of the United States, every year more than 400,000 Americans suffer injuries involving beds, mattresses or pillows. Think about that for a minute. That is more people than live in greater Coventry. That is almost 2,000 bed, mattress or pillow injuries a day. In the time it takes you to read this article, four Americans will somehow manage to be wounded by their bedding.
My point in raising this is not to suggest that Americans are somehow more inept than the rest of the world when it comes to lying down for the night (though clearly there are thousands who could do with additional training), but rather to observe that there is scarcely a statistic to do with this vast and scattered nation that doesn’t in some way give one pause.
I had this brought home to me the other day when I was in our local library looking up something else altogether in the aforesaid Abstract and happened across ‘Table No. 206: Injuries Associated with Consumer Products’. I have seldom passed a more diverting half-hour.
Consider this intriguing fact: almost 50,000 Americans are injured each year by pencils, pens and other desk accessories. How do they do it? I have spent many long hours sat at desks when I would have greeted almost any kind of injury as a welcome diversion, but never once have I come close to achieving actual bodily harm.
So I ask again: how do they do it? These are, bear in mind, injuries severe enough to warrant a trip to an emergency room. Putting a staple in the tip of your index finger (which I have done quite a lot, sometimes only semi-accidentally) doesn’t count. I am looking around my desk now and unless I put my head in the laser printer or stab myself with the scissors I cannot see a single source of potential harm within 10 feet.
But then that’s the thing about household injuries, if Table No. 206 is any guide – they can come at you from almost anywhere. Consider this one. In 1992 (the latest year for which figures are available) more than 400,000 people in the United States were injured by chairs, sofas and sofa beds. What are we to make of this? Does it tell us something trenchant about the design of modern furniture or merely that Americans are exceptionally careless sitters? What is certain is that the problem is worsening. The number of chair, sofa and sofa bed injuries showed an increase of 30,000 over the previous year, which is quite a worrying trend even for those of us who are frankly fearless with regard to soft furnishings. (That may, of course, be the nub of the problem – overconfidence.)
Predictably, ‘stairs, ramps and landings’ was the most lively category, with almost two million startled victims, but in other respects dangerous objects were far more benign than their reputations might lead you to predict. More people were injured by sound-recording equipment (46,022) than by skateboards (44,068), trampolines (43,655), or even razors and razorblades (43,365). A mere 16,670 over-exuberant choppers ended up injured by hatchets and axes, and even saws and chainsaws claimed a relatively modest 38,692 victims.
Paper money and coins (30,274) claimed nearly as many victims as scissors (34,062). I can just about conceive how you might swallow a dime and then wish you hadn’t (‘You guys want to see a neat trick?’), but I cannot for the life of me construct hypothetical circumstances involving folding money and a subsequent trip to the ER. It would be interesting to meet some of these people.
I would also welcome a chat with almost any of the 263,000 people injured by ceilings, walls and inside panels. I can’t imagine being hurt by a ceiling and not having a story worth hearing. Likewise, I could find time for any of the 31,000 people injured by their ‘grooming devices’.
But the people I would really like to meet are the 142,000 hapless souls who received emergency-room treatment for injuries inflicted by their clothing. What can they be suffering from? Compound pyjama fracture? Sweatpants haematoma? I am powerless to speculate.
I have a friend who is an orthopaedic surgeon and he told me the other day that one of the occupational hazards of his job is that you get nervous about doing almost anything since you are constantly mending people who have come a cropper in unlikely and unpredictable ways. (Only that day he had treated a man who had a moose come through the windscreen of his car, to the consternation of both.) Suddenly, thanks to Table 206, I began to see what he meant.
Interestingly, what had brought me to the Statistical Abstract in the first place was the wish to look up crime figures for the state of New Hampshire, where I now live. I had heard that it is one of the safest places in America – and indeed the Abstract bore this out. There were just four murders in the state in the latest reporting year – compared with over 23,000 for the country as a whole – and very little serious crime.
All that this means, of course, is that statistically in New Hampshire I am far more likely to be hurt by my ceiling or underpants – to cite just two potentially lethal examples – than by a stranger, and frankly I don’t find that comforting at all.
People sometimes ask me, ‘What is the difference between baseball and cricket?’
The answer is simple. Both are games of great skill involving balls and bats, but with this crucial difference: baseball is exciting and when you go home at the end of the day you know who won.
I’m joking, of course. Cricket is a wonderful game, full of deliciously scattered micro-moments of real action. If a doctor ever instructs me to take a complete rest and not get over-excited, I shall become a fan at once. In the meantime, however, I hope you will understand when I tell you that my heart belongs to baseball.
It’s what I grew up with, what I played as a boy, and that of course is vital to any meaningful appreciation of a sport. I had this brought home to me many years ago in England when I went out on to a football pitch with a couple of guys to knock a ball around.
I had watched football on TV and thought I had a fair idea of what was required, so when one of them lofted a ball in my direction, I decided to flick it casually into the net with my head, the way I had seen Kevin Keegan do it. I thought that it would be like heading a beachball – that there would be a gentle ‘ponk’ sound and that the ball would lightly leave my brow and drift in a pleasing arc into the net. But of course it was like heading a bowling ball. I have never felt anything so startlingly not like I expected it to feel. I walked around for four hours on wobbly legs with a big red circle and the word MITRE imprinted on my forehead, and vowed never again to do anything so foolish and painful.
I bring this up here because the World Series has just started and I want you to know why I am very excited about it. The World Series, I should perhaps explain, is the annual baseball contest between the champion of the American League and the champion of the National League.
Actually, that’s not quite true because they changed the system some years ago. The trouble with the old way of doing things was that it only involved two teams. Now you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out that if you could somehow contrive to include more teams there would be a lot more money in the thing.
So each league divided itself into three divisions of four or five teams. Now, the World Series is not a contest between the two best teams in baseball – at least not necessarily – but rather between the winners of a series of playoff games involving the Western, Eastern and Central divisional champions of each league, plus (and this was particularly inspired, I think) a pair of ‘wild card’ teams that didn’t win anything at all.
It is all immensely complicated, but essentially it means that practically every team in baseball except the Chicago Cubs gets a chance to go to the World Series.
The Chicago Cubs don’t get to go because they never manage to qualify even under a system as magnificently accommodating as this. Often they almost qualify, and sometimes they are in such a commanding position that you cannot believe they won’t qualify, but always in the end they doggedly manage to come up short. Whatever it takes – losing seventeen games in a row, letting easy balls go through their legs, crashing comically into each other in the outfield – you can be certain the Cubs will manage it.
They have been doing this, reliably and efficiently, for over half a century. They haven’t been in a World Series since, I believe, 1938. Mussolini had good years more recently than that. This heartwarming annual failure by the Cubs is almost the only thing in baseball that hasn’t changed in my lifetime, and I appreciate that very much.
It’s not easy being a baseball fan because baseball fans are a hopelessly sentimental bunch, and there is no room for sentiment in something as wildly lucrative as an American sport. I haven’t space here to elucidate all the misguided things they have done to my beloved game in the past forty years, so I’ll just tell you the worst: they’ve torn down nearly all the great old stadiums and replaced them with big characterless, multi-purpose arenas.
It used to be that every big American city had a venerable ball park. Generally these were dank and creaky, but they had character. You would get splinters from the seats, the soles of your shoes would congeal to the floor from all the years of sticky stuff that had been spilled during exciting moments, and your view would inevitably be obscured by a cast-iron column supporting the roof, but that was all part of the glory.
There are only four of these old parks left. One is Fenway Park in Boston, home of the Red Sox. I won’t say that Fenway’s proximity was the absolute decisive consideration in our settling in New England, but it was a factor. Now the owners want to tear it down and build a new stadium. I keep saying that when they raze Fenway I won’t go to the new stadium, but I know I’m lying because I am hopelessly addicted to the game.
All of which increases my respect and admiration for the hapless Chicago Cubs. To their eternal credit, the Cubs have never threatened to leave Chicago and continue to play at Wrigley Field. They even still play mostly day games – the way God intended baseball to be played. A day game at Wrigley Field is, believe me, one of the great American experiences.
And here’s the problem. Nobody deserves to go to the World Series more than the Chicago Cubs. But they can’t go because that would spoil their tradition of never going. It is an irreconcilable conflict. You see what I mean when I say that it is not easy being a baseball fan.
A few years ago an organization called the National Endowment for the Humanities tested 8,000 American high school seniors and found that a very large number of them didn’t know, well, anything.
Two-thirds had no idea when the US Civil War took place or which president penned the Gettysburg Address. Roughly the same proportion could not identify Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle. A third thought that Franklin Roosevelt was president during the Vietnam War and that Columbus sailed to America after 1750. Forty-two per cent – this is my favourite – couldn’t name a single country in Asia.
I am always a little dubious about these surveys because I know how easy it would be to catch me out. (‘The study found that Bryson couldn’t understand simple instructions for assembling a household barbecue and nearly always inadvertently washed both the front and back windscreens when driving round corners.’) Still, there is a kind of emptiness of thought at large these days that is hard to overlook. The phenomenon is now widely known as the Dumbing Down of America.
I first noticed it myself a few months ago when I was watching something called the Weather Channel on TV and the meteorologist said, ‘And in Albany today they had twelve inches of snow,’ then brightly added, ‘That’s about a foot.’
No, actually that is a foot, you poor sad imbecile.
On the same night I was watching a documentary on the Discovery Channel (little realizing that I would be able to watch this same documentary on the Discovery Channel up to six times a month for the rest of eternity) when the narrator intoned: ‘Owing to wind and rain, the Sphinx eroded by three feet in just three hundred years,’ then paused and solemnly added: ‘That’s a rate of one foot a century.’
See what I mean? It sometimes feels as if nearly the whole nation has taken Nytol and that the effects haven’t quite worn off. This isn’t just some curious, occasional aberration. It happens all the time.
I was recently on a cross-country flight with Continental Airlines (suggested slogan: ‘Not Quite the Worst’) and, goodness knows why, I was reading that ‘Letter from the President’ that you get at the front of every airline magazine – the one that explains how they are constantly striving to improve services, evidently by making everyone change planes at Newark. Well, this one was about how they had just conducted a survey of their customers to find out their needs.
What the customers wanted, according to the incisive prose of Mr Gordon Bethune, President and CEO, was ‘a clean, safe and reliable airline that took them where they wanted to go, on time and with their luggage’.
Gosh! Let me get a pen and a notebook! Did you say ‘with their luggage’? Wow!
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment think that Americans are inherently more stupid or brain-dead than anyone else. It’s just that they are routinely provided with conditions that spare them the need to think, and so they have got out of the habit.
Partly you can attribute it to what I call the ‘London, England’ syndrome, after the American newspaper practice of specifying the country as well as the city in datelines. If, say, the New York Times were to report on a British general election, it would dateline the story ‘London, England’, so that no reader anywhere would have to think: ‘London? Now let’s see, is that in Nebraska?’
American life is full of these little crutches, sometimes to a quite astonishing degree. A few months ago a columnist in the Boston Globe wrote a piece about unwittingly ridiculous advertisements and announcements – things like a notice in an optometrist’s shop saying ‘Eyes Examined While You Wait’ – then carefully explained what was wrong with each one. (‘Of course, it would be difficult to have your eyes examined without being there.’)
It was excruciating, but hardly unusual. Just a couple of weeks ago a writer in the New York Times magazine did almost precisely the same thing, writing an essay on amusing linguistic misunderstandings and then explaining each in turn. For example, he noted that a friend of his had always thought the Beatles’ lyric was ‘the girl with colitis goes by’, then chucklingly explained that in fact the lyric was— But you don’t need me to tell you that, do you?
The idea is to spare the audience having to think. At all. Ever. I was recently asked by an American publication to remove a reference to David Niven ‘because he’s dead and we don’t think he’ll be familiar to some of our younger readers’.
Oh, but of course.
On another occasion when I made reference to someone in Britain attending a state school, an American researcher said to me: ‘But I didn’t think they had states in Britain.’
‘I meant state in the rather broader sense of nation-state.’
‘So you mean public schools?’
‘Well, no, because public schools in Britain are private schools.’
Long pause. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘It’s a well-known fact.’
‘So let me get this straight. They call private schools public schools in Britain?’
‘Correct.’
‘Then what do they call public schools?’
‘State schools.’
Another long pause. ‘But I didn’t think they had states in Britain.’
But let us finish with my favourite inanity of the moment. It is the reply given by Bob Dole when he was asked to define the essence of his campaign.
‘It’s about the future,’ he replied gravely, ‘because that’s where we’re going.’
The scary thing is, he’s right.
Do you know what I really miss now that I live in America? I miss coming in from the pub about midnight in a blurry frame of mind and watching Open University on TV. Honestly.
If I were to come in about midnight now all I would find on the TV is a series of nubile actresses disporting in the altogether, plus the Weather Channel, which is diverting in its way, I grant you, but it doesn’t begin to compare with the hypnotic fascination of the Open University after six pints of beer. I’m quite serious about this.
I’m not at all sure why, but I always found it strangely compelling to turn on the TV late at night and find a guy who looked as if he had bought all the clothes he would ever need during one shopping trip to C&A in 1977 (so that he would be free to spend the rest of his waking hours around oscilloscopes) saying in an oddly characterless voice, ‘And so we can see, adding two fixed-end solutions gives us another fixed-end solution.’
Most of the time I had no idea what he was talking about – that was a big part of what made it so compelling somehow – but very occasionally (well, once) the topic was something I could actually follow and enjoy. I’m thinking of an unexpectedly diverting documentary I chanced upon three or four years ago comparing the marketing of proprietary healthcare products in Britain and the United States.
The gist of the programme was that the same product had to be sold in entirely different ways in the two markets. An advertisement in Britain for a cold relief capsule, for instance, would promise no more than that it might make you feel a bit better. You would still have a red nose and be in your dressing gown, but you would be smiling again, if wanly.
A commercial for the same product in America would guarantee total, instantaneous relief. An American who took this miracle compound would not only throw off his dressing gown and get back to work at once, he would feel better than he had for years and finish the day having the time of his life at a bowling alley.
The drift of all this was that the British don’t expect over-the-counter drugs to change their lives, whereas Americans will settle for nothing less. The passing of the years has not, I can assure you, dulled the nation’s touching faith in the notion.
You have only to watch any television channel for ten minutes, flip through a magazine or stroll along the groaning shelves of any drugstore to realize that Americans expect to feel more or less perfect all the time. Even our household shampoo, I notice, promises to ‘change the way you feel’.
It is an odd thing about Americans. They expend huge efforts exhorting themselves to ‘Say No to Drugs’, then go to the drugstore and buy them by the armloads. Americans spend almost $75 billion a year on medicines of all types, and pharmaceutical products are marketed with a vehemence and forthrightness that can take a little getting used to.
In one commercial running on television at the moment, a pleasant-looking middle-aged lady turns to the camera and says in a candid tone: ‘You know, when I get diarrhoea I like a little comfort.’ (To which I always say: ‘Why wait for diarrhoea?’)
In another a man at a bowling alley (men are pretty generally at bowling alleys in these things) grimaces after a poor shot and mutters to his partner, ‘It’s these haemorrhoids again.’ And here’s the thing. The buddy has some haemorrhoid cream in his pocket! Not in his gym bag, you understand, not in the glovebox of his car, but in his shirt pocket, where he can whip it out at a moment’s notice and call the gang round. Extraordinary.
But the really amazing change in the last twenty years is that now even prescription drugs are advertised. I have before me a popular magazine called Health that is just chock-full of ads with bold headlines saying things like ‘Why take two tablets when you can take one? Prempro is the only prescription tablet that combines Premarin and a progestin in one tablet,’ or, ‘Introducing Allegra, the new prescription seasonal allergy medicine that lets you get out there.’
Another more rakishly asks, ‘Have you ever treated a vaginal yeast infection in the middle of nowhere?’ (Not knowingly!) A fourth goes to the economic heart of the matter and declares, ‘The doctor told me I’d probably be taking blood pressure pills for the rest of my life. The good news is how much I might save since he switched me to Adalat CC (nifedipine) from Procardia XL (nifedipine).’
The idea is that you read the advert, then badger your doctor (or ‘healthcare professional’) to prescribe it for you. It seems a curious concept to me, the idea of magazine readers deciding what medications are best for them, but then Americans appear to know a great deal about drugs. Nearly all the adverts assume an impressively high level of biochemical familiarity. The vaginal yeast ad confidently assures the reader that Diflucan is ‘comparable to seven days of Monistat 7, Gyne-Lotrimin, or Mycelex-7’, while the ad for Prempro promises that it is ‘as effective as taking Premarin and a progestin separately’.
When you realize that these are meaningful statements for thousands and thousands of Americans, the idea of your bowling buddy carrying a tube of haemorrhoid unguent in his shirt pocket perhaps doesn’t seem quite so ridiculous.
I don’t know whether this national obsession with health is actually worth it. What I do know is that there is a much more agreeable way to achieve perfect inner harmony. Drink six pints of beer and watch Open University for ninety minutes before retiring. It has never failed for me.
One of the pleasures of living in a small, old-fashioned New England town is that you usually get a small, old-fashioned post office. Ours is particularly agreeable. It’s in an attractive federal-style brick building, grand but not flashy, that looks like a post office ought to. It even smells nice – a combination of gum adhesive and old central heating turned up a little too high.
The counter staff are always briskly efficient and pleased to give you an extra piece of sticky tape if it looks as if your envelope flap might peel open. Moreover, American post offices deal only with postal matters – they don’t concern themselves with pensions, car tax, family allowances, TV licences, passports, lottery tickets or any of the hundred other things that make a visit to any British post office such a popular, all-day event and provide a fulfilling and reliable diversion for chatty people who enjoy nothing so much as a good long hunt in their purses and handbags for exact change. Here there are never any queues and you are in and out in minutes.
Best of all, once a year every American post office has a Customer Appreciation Day. Ours was yesterday. I had never heard of this wonderful custom, but I was taken with it immediately. The employees had hung up banners, put out a long table with a nice checkered cloth and laid on a generous spread of doughnuts, pastries and hot coffee – all of it free.
It seemed a wonderfully improbable notion, the idea of a faceless government bureaucracy thanking me and my fellow townspeople for our patronage, but I was impressed and grateful – and, I must say, it was good to be reminded that postal employees are not just mindless automatons who spend their days mangling letters and whimsically sending my royalty cheques to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba, but rather are dedicated, highly trained individuals who spend their days mangling letters and sending my royalty cheques to a guy in Vermont named Bill Bubba.
Anyway, I was won over utterly. Now I would hate for you to think that my loyalty with respect to postal delivery systems can be cheaply bought with a chocolate twirl doughnut and a styrofoam cup of coffee, but in fact it can. Much as I admire the Royal Mail, it has never once offered me a morning snack, so I have to tell you that as I strolled home from my errand, wiping crumbs from my face, my thoughts towards American life in general and the US Postal Service in particular were pretty incomparably favourable.
But, as nearly always with government services, it couldn’t last. When I got home, the day’s mail was on the mat. There among the usual copious invitations to acquire new credit cards, save a rainforest, become a life member of the National Incontinence Foundation, add my name (for a small fee) to the Who’s Who of People Named Bill in New England, examine without obligation Volume One of Great Explosions, help the National Rifle Association with its Arm-a-Toddler campaign and the scores of other unsought inducements, special offers and solicitations involving naff little adhesive rectangles with my name and address already printed on them which arrive each day at every American home – and you really cannot believe the volume of junk mail that you receive in this country nowadays – well, among all this clutter and detritus was a forlorn and mangled letter that I had sent forty-one days earlier to a friend in California, care of his place of employment, and that was now being returned to me marked ‘Insufficient Address – Get Real and Try Again’ or words to that effect.
At the sight of this I issued a small despairing sigh, and not merely because I had just sold the US Postal Service my soul for a doughnut. It happens that I had recently read an article on wordplay in the Smithsonian magazine in which the author asserted that some puckish soul had once sent a letter addressed, with playful ambiguity, to
HILL
JOHN
MASS
and it had got there after the American postal authorities worked out that it was to be read as ‘John Underhill, Andover, Mass.’ (Get it?)
It’s a nice story, and I would truly like to believe it, but the fate of my letter to California, freshly returned after a forty-one-day adventure trip to the west, seemed to suggest a need for caution with regard to the postal service and its sleuthing abilities.
The problem with my letter was that I had addressed it to my friend merely ‘c/o Black Oak Books, Berkeley, California’, without a street name or number because I didn’t know either. I appreciate that that is not a complete address, but it is a lot more explicit than ‘Hill John Mass’ and anyway Black Oak Books is a Berkeley institution. Anyone who knows the city – and I had assumed in my quaintly naive way that that would include the local postal authorities – would know Black Oak Books. But oh no. (Goodness knows, incidentally, what my letter had been doing in California for nearly six weeks, though it came back with a nice tan and an urge to get in touch with its inner feelings.)
Now just to give this plaintive tale a little heartwarming perspective, let me tell you that not long before I departed from England, the Royal Mail had brought me, within forty-eight hours of its posting in London, a letter addressed to ‘Bill Bryson, Writer, Yorkshire Dales’, which is a pretty impressive bit of sleuthing. (And never mind that the correspondent was a trifle off his head.)
So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge, and one that gives me free sticky tape and prompt service but won’t help me out when I can’t remember a street name. The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things that are worse, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That may not be the profoundest of insights, but I did get a free doughnut as well, so on balance I guess I’m happy.
Now if you will excuse me I have to drive to Vermont and collect some mail from a Mr Bubba.
My wife thinks nearly everything about American life is wonderful. She loves having her groceries bagged for her. She adores free iced water and bookmatches. She thinks home-delivered pizza is a central hallmark of civilization. I haven’t the heart to tell her that waitresses in the States urge everyone to have a nice day.
Personally, while I am fond of America and grateful for its many conveniences, I am not quite so slavishly uncritical. Take the matter of having your groceries bagged for you. I appreciate the gesture, but when you come down to it what does it actually achieve except give you an opportunity to stand there and watch your groceries being bagged? It’s not as if it buys you some quality time. I don’t want to get heavy here, but given the choice between free iced water at restaurants and, let us say, a national health service, I have to say my instinct is to go with the latter.
However, there are certain things that are so wonderful in American life that I can hardly stand it myself. Chief among these, without any doubt, is the garbage disposal. A garbage disposal is everything a labour-saving device should be and so seldom is – noisy, fun, extremely hazardous, and so dazzlingly good at what it does that you cannot imagine how you ever managed without one. If you had asked me eighteen months ago what the prospects were that shortly my chief hobby would be placing assorted objects down a hole in the kitchen sink, I believe I would have laughed in your face, but in fact it is so.
I have never had a garbage disposal before, so I have been learning its tolerances through a process of trial and error. Chopsticks give perhaps the liveliest response (this is not recommended, of course, but there comes a time with every piece of machinery when you just have to see what it can do), but cantaloupe rinds make the richest, throatiest sound and result in less ‘down time’. Coffee grounds in quantity are the most likely to provide a satisfying ‘Vesuvius effect’, though for obvious reasons it is best not to attempt this difficult feat until your wife has gone out for the day, and to have a mop and stepladder standing by.
The most exciting event with a garbage disposal, of course, is when it jams and you have to reach in and unclog it, knowing that at any moment it might spring to life and abruptly convert your arm from a useful grasping tool into a dibber. Don’t try to tell me about living life on the edge.
Equally satisfying in its way, and certainly no less ingenious, is the little-known fireplace ashpit. This is simply a metal plate – a kind of trapdoor – built into the floor of the living room fireplace above a deep, brick-lined pit. When you clean the fireplace, instead of sweeping the ash into a bucket and then trailing the dribblings through the house, you manoeuvre it into this hole and it disappears for ever. Brilliant.
In theory the ashpit must eventually fill up, but ours seems to be bottomless. Down in the basement there’s a small metal door in the wall that allows you to see how the pit is doing, and occasionally I go down to have a look. It isn’t really necessary, but it gives me an excuse to go down in the basement, and I always welcome that because basements are the third great feature of American life. They are wonderful chiefly because they are so amazingly, so spaciously, useless.
Now basements I know because I grew up with one. Every American basement is the same. They all have a clothesline that is rarely used, a trickle of water from an indeterminable source running diagonally across the floor, and a funny smell – a combination of old magazines, camping gear that should have been aired and wasn’t, and something to do with a guinea pig named Mr Fluffy that escaped down a central heating grate six months ago and has not been seen since (and presumably would now be better called Mr Bones).