I was just having a chat with someone I work with about the Bill Bryson books I have on my desk – someone had borrowed them and I haven’t taken them home yet. He was saying his favourite is “Notes from a Small Island“, about Bill’s last trip around the UK before moving back to the US. That was the first one of the Bryson books I read. My favourite is probably still “Neither here nor there“, and it is mainly because of the following section which is about Paris:
“you would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter
‘No, No,’ you would say hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.’
The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.
This still makes me chuckle! If you’ve never read a Bill Bryson book, give them a try, they’re good fun.
