Bill Bryson's mood swings

The first note I wrote on the 3x5 card I used as a bookmark for Bill Bryson's The Road to Little Little Dribbling refers to the line "vital ugliness of our age" at the bottom of page 23. The last one mentions the phrase "the world's largest park" on page 376. Both lines refer to Great Britain, Bryson's adopted home (he was born in Iowa) and the subject of his book.

The extremes of the two phrases, from "vital ugliness" to "world's largest park," nicely summarize the entire book, which is a roller coaster of extremes in moods and impressions. On one page he marvels at how wonderful, how beautiful, how amazing Britain and its people are. On the next he rants about all the ugliness and stupidity he encounters. He remarks several times about getting older, and in fact he writes like a sentimental old man one minute, a grouchy old man the next. I have read several Bill Bryson books, but I don't recall any in which he is so angry or cruel (imaging all sorts of violence against those who annoy him) or so generous in his praise.

The book, published in 2015, is something of a followup to an earlier one, Notes from a Small Island. Rather than retrace his steps from that book, he follows a different route on his tour of Great Britain, although returning to a few of the same places. This time he takes a winding road more or less following what he calls The Bryson Line, or the longest straight line one can draw on a map of Great Britain, from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath. Nowhere on his map is Little Dribbling, but apparently it sounded better than Cape Wrath.

In his positive moods, Bryson writes such things as this: London "is centuries of happy accidents." A drive through Britain "is just miles of accidental loveliness." The whole country is "casually strewn with glory." He mentions more than once how many of the world's greatest works of literature and greatest scientific discoveries have come from this small island.

As in his other books, Bryson is at his best when off on a tangent. He digs into the history of places he visits and has a way of making that history fascinating in a manner your high school history teacher never possessed. Sometimes his tangents appear, at least at first, to have nothing at all to do with his travels, yet they can be more interesting than his main subject.

Three times he tells of moments that changed his life. One was a bomb dropped by the Germans during the war, long before he even came to the country. Another was a poster he saw that led him to Great Britain and to the woman he married there. Another was finding two books in the London Library. Reflecting on a life gone by and how one got from there to here may be another trait Bryson shares with other senior citizens. He is now 66 and should have a few more journeys to take and books to write.