Notes from a Big Country
Bill Bryson
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 0552997862
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From perfectly formed potatoes to adulterous US presidents, and from domestic upsets to millennial fever, Bill Bryson just cannot resist airing his opinions and standing up for his (mostly) law-abiding fellow American citizens. But of course after twenty years in England, he is now back on the other side of the pond, and is obviously having a little trouble finding his true American self again. After vigorous exercise on the Appalachian Trail comes this edited collection of Bryson's most splenetic comic pieces culled from his humorous regular column in the Mail on Sunday.
is that they can fall on any day of the week, whereas most people like to have their public holidays on Mondays so that they get a nice long weekend. So for a while America celebrated Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday on the Mondays nearest the appropriate dates. However, this bothered some people of a particular nature, so it was decided to have a single holiday on the third Monday of February and call it Presidents Day. The idea now is to honour all the presidents, whether they
mention this because our subject this week is large-scale incompetence. Despite my best efforts there abounds a terrible myth, which I should like to lay to rest once and for all, that America is an efficient place. It is anything but. Partly this is because it is a big country. Big countries spawn big bureaucracies. Those bureaucracies spawn lots of departments and each of those departments issues lots of rules and regulations. An inevitable consequence is that with so many departments the
hordes of shuffling grazers and curious to see what the weather was like back on Planet Earth, I stepped outside with a view to having a stroll through the grounds. And guess what? There were no grounds – just acres and acres of car park, rolling across the landscape for as far as the eye could see in nearly every direction. Across the way, only a couple of hundred yards distant, was the Opryland Amusement Park, but there was no way to gain entrance to it on foot. The only means of access, I
weekend in November. Moreover, Thanksgiving remains a pure holiday, largely unsullied by commercialization. It involves no greetings cards, no trees to trim, no perplexed hunt through drawers and cupboards for decorations. At Thanksgiving all you do is sit at a table and try to get your stomach into the shape of a beach ball, and then go and watch a game of American football on the TV. This is my kind of holiday. But perhaps the nicest, and certainly the noblest, aspect of Thanksgiving is that
stores at big malls. The sales assistant is always a white-haired lady working in the menswear department. ‘Can I help you find anything?’ she says. ‘No thank you, I’m just browsing,’ you tell her. ‘OK,’ she replies, and gives you a smarmy smile that says: ‘I don’t really like you; I’m just required to smile at everyone.’ So you wander round the department and at some point you idly finger a sweater. You don’t know why because you don’t like it, but you touch it anyway. In an instant, the