Bill Bryson: Notes from a small Island

Bill Bryson (deutsch)

Notes from a small Island (englisch)

Kundenrezensionen (deutsch)

"Bryson also pays homage to the humble self-effacing fortitude of British people under trying times such as the world wars and Great Depression, as well as the various peculiarities of Britain and British English (such as not understanding, on his first arrival, what a counterpane was, and assuming it was something to do with a window. It is a British English word that means quilt.)" (en:Wikipedia)

Bryson über englischen Humor (S.227): Auf einem Bahnhof war totales Chaos, alle Anzeigetafeln waren leer, es kamen Gerüchte auf, aufgrund derer man hin und her hetzte und sich in Züge setzte, die nicht abfuhren.
Unsicher, ob er wieder auf einen dauerhaft geparkten Zug reinfallen könnte, fragte Bryson den einzigen Passagier, den er im Zug entdeckte und der sich durch einen langen roten Bart auszeichnete, 'mit dem man eine Matratze hätte füllen können', "Sind Sie schon lange hier?"
Der Bärtige: "Wie man's nimmt. Als ich einstieg, war ich jedenfalls frisch rasiert."

Wikipedia Commons, Strich von Fontanefan

"If you draw an angled line between Bristol and the Wash, you divide the country into two halves with roughly twenty-seven million people of each side. Between 1980 and 1985 the southern half lost 103,600 jobs. In the northern half in the same period they lost 1,032,000 jobs, alsmost exactly ten times as many. And still factories are shutting. [...] So I ask again: What do all those people in all those houses do - and what, more to the point, will their children do?" (Notes from a small Island, S. 212 Copyright 1995)

Die möglichen Folgen des Brexit sind dabei nicht eingerechnet. Ich möchte die Frage aber "more to the point" zu einer Linie west-östlich durch das Mittelmeer stellen und mich speziell auf den Handel der EU mit Afrika und auf Deutschlands Rolle als Exportweltmeister beziehen: Was werden die Menschen in 20 Jahren in Afrika tun, wenn wir an unserer Politik festhalten?


"Liverpool became the third richest city in the empire. Only Glasgow and London had more millionaires. By 1880 it was generating mor tax revenue than Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield together [...]" (S.239)

"Blackpool [...] attracts more visitors every year than Greece and has more holiday beds than the whole of Portugal." (S.268) "I read somewhere once that half of all visitors to Blackpool have been there at least ten times." (S.269)
"The town went into decline when cheap air travel arrived in the 1960s and the same workers decamped to the Mediterranean coastal resorts due to competitive prices and the more reliable weather.^[28] Today Blackpool remains the most popular seaside resort in the UK; however, the town has suffered a serious drop in numbers of visitors which have fallen from 17 million in 1992 to 10 million today.^[29] Similarly Pleasure Beach Blackpool was the country's most popular free attraction with 6 million visitors a year but has lost over a million visitors since 1998 and has recently introduced a £5 entrance fee. Today, many visitors stay for the weekend rather than for a week at a time." (Wikipedia zu Blackpool, 2017)

Saltaire (S.207) Coronation Street (S.226) Paul Theroux (S.244) Port Sunlight (S.241)  
Durham (S.294)  Ashington Group (S.296) Edinburgh (S.302)

Mehr zu diesem Buch und Brysons Fortsetzung 20 Jahre später.

Bill Bryson: The Road to Little Dribbling

Ich stelle dies Buch und seinen Vorgänger für den Augenblick nur durch Zitate und den Wanderbericht eines Bekannten vor, der eine charakteristisch unspektakuläre, liebenswerte Landschaft beschreibt. Es ist schon wahr, was der Amerikaner Bryson nicht müde wird, zu betonen: Es gibt auf der Welt vielleicht keine Gegend, wo auf engem Raum eine so vielseitig reizvolle Landschaft und so beeindruckende kulturelle Zeugnisse versammelt sind wie auf der größten der Britischen Inseln, das liegt nicht nur am British Museum. Spektakulärer, erhabener, aufregender ist manches andere, was man auf der Welt findet. (Relativ viel davon habe ich in diesem Blog beschrieben gesehen.) Aber ...

"The High Street at first seemed pretty much unchanged. The buildings offered a pleasantly higgledy-piggeldy mix of styles, sizes and materials, yet formed a comfortable and coherent whole in that way that British towns seemed to do effortlessly for centuries and now often can hardly do at all. Though the buildings were the same, the buisinesses within them were completely changed. It is remarkable, when you think about it, how many types of shops have vanished from British high streete in only a few years: most butchers, greengrocers, fishmongers, ironmongers, repair shops, gas showrooms, electricity board showrooms, most building societies, travel agents and independent bookshops, and loads of once famous names - Freeman, Hardy & Willis, Woolworth's, Dillons and Ottokar's bookshops, Lunn Poly, Dolcis, Radio Rentals. Richard Shops, Beatties toy shops, Netto, John Menzies, Army and Navy Stores, and Rumbelows, to name just some." (S.148/49)

Massey's Folly (S.171) in Farringdon

Silbury Hill (S.182)

West Kennet Long Barrow (S.182/83)

"In other coutries they fight over politics and religion. In Britain it is over who gets to walk on a windswept moor. I think that's rather splendid." (Bill Bryson: The Road to Little Dribbling, S.344)
"Brochs are prehistoric stone towers, [...] what I particularly like about them is that they are completely mysterous. No one has any idea what they were for." (The Road to Little Dribbling, S.467)

Was ich an dem Buch so liebe, ist die unverbrüchliche Liebe zu seinem Gegenstand, einem Land, das nicht seine Heimat ist.
Ich kann nicht sagen, dass ich diese Art von Liebe teile, aber ich kann sie ihm intensiv nachfühlen.

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain - which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad - Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying 'mustn't grumble' and 'I'm terribly sorry but', people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays - every bit of it. [...]
 What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners' Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course." (Bill Bryson: Notes from a Small Island)

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