Wherever it is you want to go, the consensus is generally that it’s just about possible as long as you scrupulously avoid Okehampton, the Hanger Lane gyratory system, central Oxford and the Severn Bridge westbound between the hours of 3 p.m. Give two or more men in a pub the names of any two places in Britain and they can happily fill hours. ‘Unless, of course, you’re coming from Crewkerne,’ someone else will add eagerly. It saves a good three or four minutes and cuts out the rail crossing at Great Shagging.’ ‘– and follow the dirt track through the army firing range and round the back of the cement works, it drops down on to the B3689 Ram’s Dropping bypass. ‘Nice little pub,’ somebody will interject – usually, for some reason, a guy in a bulky cardigan. Well, if you follow that road past the reservoir and under the railway bridge, and take a sharp right at the Buggered Ploughman –’ ‘Well, about a quarter of a mile past there, not the first left turning, but the second one, there’s a lane between two hedgerows – they’re mostly hawthorn but with a little hazel mixed in.
By the dead sycamore.’Īt this point, you find you are the only person in the group not nodding vigorously. ‘You know, just past the turnoff for Little Puking but before the B6029 mini-roundabout. ‘You know that layby outside Warminster, the one with the grit box with the broken handle?’ one of them will say. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you, as a foreigner, swivelling your head in quiet wonderment. If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, ‘Well, now that’s a bit of a tall order,’ and then they’ll launch into a lively and protracted discussion of whether it’s better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Ilchester or the A361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet. This last is easily the most intractable. A third is the idea that Britain is a big place.
Another is that the England football team shouldn’t have any trouble with Norway. One is that British summers used to be longer and sunnier. There are certain idiosyncratic notions that you quietly come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. Bill Bryson takes on Little England from his own unique perspective in this extract from Notes from a Small Island.
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