The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  Even better was the Post Office Tower in London. For over a decade and a half, it was the tallest building in Europe. It dominated the London skyline. Yet because it was used for satellite communications, its existence was officially a secret. It wasn’t allowed to appear on Ordnance Survey maps until 1995.

  So I was delighted to find that Britain’s Food Standards Agency now makes public all its inspection reports. You can look up the ratings of any restaurant and food handler in the country. This, I discovered, provides hours of absorption. I checked out every restaurant I have ever gone to, and found that two of my favourites aren’t nearly as keen on hygiene as I would like them to be, which is why you don’t see me in them any more. One striking feature is that many of the inspection reports are not very current. A good many are up to three years old. This is because local authority food inspection budgets have been slashed. It is evidently more important, in this curious age in which we live, to save taxpayers’ money than it is to be vigilant in ensuring that their local restaurants aren’t poisoning them.

  When I read about the court case against the Crown Manor House, I felt sufficiently moved to do something I had never done before: I opened an account with TripAdvisor, created a password and submitted a review. It wasn’t actually a review, but a message alerting customers that the hotel had been fined for having rats in its kitchens and directing readers to a link to the newspaper article. My feeling was that if I were considering booking into a hotel that had been fined recently for having rats in its kitchens, I would very much appreciate it if someone drew my attention to it. A few days later, TripAdvisor sent me an email saying: ‘We have opted not to publish your review as it does not meet our guidelines … We accept reviews that detail first-hand experiences with the facilities or services of an establishment. General discussion that does not detail a substantial experience will not be posted. No second-hand information or hearsay (unverified information, rumours or quotations from other sources or the reported opinions/experience of others).’

  So there you have it. Criminal convictions, government hygiene ratings and other second-hand information have no place on a hotel and restaurant ratings website. As I write, TripAdvisor gives the Crown Manor House Hotel high recommendations for both quality and cleanliness, and there is no indication that it has ever in the recent past been otherwise.

  Let’s pause for just a moment to incorporate a little context here. Think back to a time when you were about as drunk as you have ever been, and you went into a late night kebab house, a place where the meat was so close to being alive that it was actually sweating. And even though both the premises and employees looked like they had not been washed for years, you nonetheless bought and greedily devoured a kebab. Even now the thought of it makes you retch just a little at the back of your throat. Well, that kebab house has never been fined £16,000, with £4,000 costs, for being disgustingly filthy. In your whole life, you may never have experienced a place so squalid that it got a zero rating and had its kitchen shut down twice.

  But then you may just have been reading TripAdvisor first-hand recommendations.

  Chapter 8

  Beside the Seaside

  ENGLAND IS A complicated place. It has five different kinds of counties, all with different histories, purposes and boundaries. First, there are historic counties – the ones that go way back in history – like Surrey, Dorset and Hampshire. Most of these are still there, but some have been chopped into smaller pieces or even summarily dismissed and exist today only as partial relics or fond memories. Huntingdonshire was absorbed into Cambridgeshire forty years ago, but people still tell you that they live there. Middlesex hasn’t been a county since 1965, but there is still a Middlesex County Cricket Club and a Middlesex University.

  Then there are administrative counties, which exist principally to provide working boundaries for county councils. Administrative counties tend to pop in and out of existence like soap bubbles. Humberside was created in 1974, but disbanded in 1996. Rutland, conversely, was banished in 1974 and resuscitated in 1996.

  The third kind of county are postal counties, whose boundaries may be different again. The outline of Cheshire, for instance, on the postal map is quite different from that of Cheshire on a historic map and different again from its administrative shape.

  After postal counties come ceremonial counties, each of which has a Lord Lieutenant (or Official Twit), to preside over royal visits and other grand occasions requiring someone with a sword and a jacket with epaulettes, but otherwise ceremonial counties, like the Lord Lieutenants who serve them, have no known purpose.

  Finally there is Cornwall, which isn’t a county at all but a duchy – a distinction that the Cornish are very sensitive about. (You could say that it is a touchy duchy.)

  And that is just English counties. Welsh and Scottish counties are separately complicated. The result of all of this, not surprisingly, is occasional confusion. When I worked on the Business News section of The Times we frequently had conversations on the sub-editors’ table that started with a question like:

  ‘Where’s Hull?’

  ‘Up north,’ someone would answer confidently.

  ‘No, I mean what county is it in?’

  ‘Oh. Dunno.’

  ‘I think it’s in East Yorkshire,’ someone else would say.

  ‘I don’t think there is an East Yorkshire,’ a fourth person would say.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t think so. Well, maybe. Not sure actually.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ yet another person would interject, ‘because Hull isn’t in East Yorkshire even if there is an East Yorkshire, which there isn’t. Hull is in Lincolnshire.’

  ‘Actually, I think it’s in Humberside. Or possibly Cleveland,’ a sixth person would add.

  ‘Cleveland is a city in the United States,’ someone else would volunteer.

  ‘There’s a Cleveland up north now, too.’

  ‘Really? When did that happen?’

  ‘No idea. Not sure if it’s a county or just an administrative unit.’

  These conversations could go on for hours and would generally end up with the person who started it all deciding that he would just put ‘Hull’ and leave it at that.

  The one corner of the country I knew about was Bournemouth and its smaller neighbour Christchurch because I had worked in one and lived in the other. Until 1974, Bournemouth and Christchurch were in Hampshire, but in that year English county boundaries were redrawn and Bournemouth and Christchurch were hefted into Dorset. The idea was to take some people out of overpopulated Hampshire and put them into underpopulated Dorset. But news of this change hadn’t filtered through to everyone, so sometimes even into the 1980s a news article in The Times would place Bournemouth in Hampshire. Once when this happened I sauntered over to the Home News sub-editors’ table and pointed out to the acting chief sub that they had Bournemouth in Hampshire.

  ‘And your point is?’ he said.

  ‘Well, Bournemouth’s not in Hampshire,’ I elaborated.

  ‘I believe you’ll find it is,’ he said, returning to his work.

  ‘No, it’s in Dorset. I worked for two years on the paper in Bournemouth. It was part of the condition of employment to know where we were.’

  The Home News sub-editors didn’t have a lot of respect for the Business News sub-editors and I have to say I don’t entirely blame them. We looked a little like Vince Vaughn’s team in DodgeBall.

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ the chief sub told me.

  ‘You don’t need to look into it. It is a fact.’

  ‘And I said we’ll look into it.’

  I don’t remember my exact words from this distant remove, but I daresay ‘anus’ was in there somewhere.

  ‘Touchy fucker,’ the chief sub said as I walked off.

  ‘He’s an American,’ one of his colleagues pointed out gravely.

  I looked in the final edition of the paper the next morning and Bournemouth was still in Hampshire.
People on the Home News desk were by and large wankers, except for one or two who didn’t rise quite that high.

  Anyway, Christchurch is indubitably in Dorset, and, forty minutes after leaving Lyndhurst, so was I.

  I have an abiding attachment to Christchurch. When my wife and I were newly married and I had my first grown-up job on the Evening Echo in Bournemouth, we lived for six months in a rented flat above a fish and chip shop in the outlying district of Purewell, then bought a bungalow in the even more outlying hamlet of Burton. It was a sweet white-painted cottage with a pretty garden and a distinctive copper beech on the front lawn, a perfect first home. We bought it from a kindly white-haired couple who had lived there for decades and were most concerned that we should look after the garden, which we solemnly promised to do and lovingly did for the two years we lived there.

  I hadn’t seen the house in years and wondered if it would look small now, the way fondly remembered places so often do. In fact, I didn’t recognize it. I drove up and down our old road twice without spotting my own house, and finally parked and got out to have a closer look on foot. The only property I could find with a copper beech didn’t look like ours at all.

  I stood out front and checked a slip of paper to make sure I had the house number right. I did, but it was nothing like the house we had lived in and fussed over. The front garden was gone altogether, buried under asphalt. The most decorative objects on it were two wheelie bins and a terracotta pot with a dead plant in it. A little enclosed glass porch that had served as a mini-greenhouse had been taken away for no visibly good reason. Even more pointlessly, a perky bow window, once the central feature of the house, was gone, too, replaced with a rectangle of aluminiumized double glazing.

  Nearly all the other houses on the street had been similarly assaulted by owners looking for more parking and less maintenance. All the lovely gardens, all the well-tended prettiness of my day, were gone. It really doesn’t pay to go back and look again at the things that once delighted you because it’s unlikely they will delight you now.

  I continued on to Christchurch, fearing the worst, but in fact it was quite all right. Most of the good things were still standing and some of the ugly things – notably, a semi-industrial area formerly dominated by a large pale-blue gasometer – had been taken away. The gasometer zone was now occupied by smart apartments and retirement homes with jaunty, if entirely imaginary, nautical names like The Moorings or Sea View Meadows, which I suppose is more romantic and commercial than Gasometer Way or Goodness Knows What’s Buried Beneath Us Cottages.

  The High Street at first sight seemed pretty much unchanged. The buildings offered a pleasantly higgledy-piggledy 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 businesses within them were completely changed. It is remarkable, when you think about it, how many types of shops have vanished from British high streets 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 Ottakar’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. I don’t think I ever went into a Rumbelows – I am not at all sure what they sold – but I kind of miss them now. On one prominent corner of Christchurch when we lived there was a Court’s furniture showroom, but that’s long gone. I never went in there either. I don’t think anyone ever did. I suppose that’s why it is no longer there.

  Beside Court’s was the post office, and that’s gone, too. I know we must lament the loss of high street post offices and I very much do, as long as I never have to go in one myself. There has never been a less pleasurable, more Soviet-style environment in which to pass half an hour than in a British post office queue. Did you know, at their peak you could conduct any of 231 types of transaction in a British post office – renew your TV licence, collect pensions and family allowances, pay car tax, withdraw or deposit money in a savings account, buy premium bonds, post parcels. All that was required of you was that you be white-haired, hard of hearing and able to spend up to an hour hunting through a tiny coin purse for a 20p piece.

  Despite all the changes in retail patterns, Christchurch’s High Street seemed to be thriving. The old Regent Cinema, which in my day was a dowdy Mecca bingo hall, had been refurbished in an enlightened joint undertaking between the borough council and a non-profit charity set up to run it. Now it offers a busy programme of new and old movies, theatrical productions, talks and satellite broadcasts from places like the Royal Opera House and Royal Shakespeare Company, and a whole lot more. I was impressed. The restaurants in Christchurch are clearly better than they used to be, the pubs are cleaner, the supermarkets more exotically stocked. Christchurch was my new model community.

  I had a look around Christchurch Priory – the biggest parish church in England, I believe, and very fine it is, too – and the quayside, then walked out past the flat where my wife and I once lived (the fish and chip shop was still there, I was pleased to see), then on a little-used path around the marshy harbour to the neighbouring village of Mudeford, with long, dreamy views across the water to the stately grey hulk of the priory, and I thought that when England is lovely there isn’t any place I would rather be.

  I had lunch at a nice waterside café in Mudeford, then returned to the car and drove on the five miles or so to Bournemouth. When I did Notes from a Small Island, I stayed at the Pavilion Hotel in Bournemouth. It was a pleasant, old-fashioned place and I thought I would stay there again, but it turns out that the Pavilion was torn down in 2005. It took me some time to work this out, because when I Googled ‘Pavilion Hotel, Bournemouth’, I got responses from seventeen hotel booking companies all faithfully promising to get me a room at the Pavilion Hotel at a very attractive rate. The first one turned out to be for the Pavilion Hotel in Avalon, California.

  As usual I am left staggered by the internet. How can anything be so useful and stupid at the same time? Does somebody somewhere in the Google universe really think that I am looking for any hotel in the world called the Pavilion and that one in California will do me as well as one in Bournemouth? I know these things are managed by an algorithm, but somebody still has to give it parameters. But then, I suppose, that is the thing about the internet. It is just an accumulation of digital information, with no brains and no feelings – just like an IT person, in fact.

  The bottom line is that seventeen companies promised that if I opened their pages they would book me into a hotel that in fact no longer exists. TripAdvisor’s search entry indicated that the Pavilion Hotel in Bournemouth had a rating of 4.7 out of 5. ‘Book Pavilion Hotel and Save on Pavilion Hotel!’ it shouted in strangulated English, so I clicked on its page out of curiosity and of course it turns out that when you reach the right page on TripAdvisor there is no Pavilion there because there is no Pavilion there. This is the thing that just drives me mad about the internet, which is that the commercial parts of it operate on the assumption that there is no particular necessity for any part of it to be accurate, truthful or reliable. When did that become all right?

  Luckily, one thing Bournemouth has in abundance is alternative hotels and my wife had booked me into a boutique establishment – the Slightly Up Ourselves Hotel, I think it may have been called – on the East Cliff, where I dropped my bags, admired the arrangement of twigs in a bowl by the door, and hastened back out, eager to see the town. By chance, the hotel was by the bus stop where I used to get off for work each morning, so I decided to retrace the steps I took back then from bus stop to workplace to see how much I could recall.

  I loved coming to work in those days. I was young, newly married, in my first real job. The English seaside was still something
special then. Bournemouth was the queen of the south coast resorts and I felt lucky to spend every day in a place that other people saved up to visit occasionally. I rode each morning on a yellow double-decker bus from Christchurch, via Tuckton, Southbourne and Boscombe. I always sat upstairs, usually at the front, and experienced every journey like a seven-year-old on a school outing. Bounding off the bus on a hill above the sea, I walked a few hundred yards through the town, down one hill and up another, to the rather grand art deco offices of the Echo on Richmond Hill, one of several hundred people whose important job it was to get the town up and running each morning. I enjoyed the responsibility.

  Early on I discovered a short cut through a wooded cemetery tumbling down a hillside behind St Peter’s Church. One morning, when I stopped to tie a shoelace, I found that I was looking at the grave of Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein and widow of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. I had no idea that she was there, but then few people do. Mary Shelley only went to Bournemouth once, to visit her son who was living there, but she declared a wish to be buried there with her parents, the writer William Godwin and the noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin – a somewhat odd request since they were long dead and had no connection with the town either. Nonetheless Mary’s son dutifully had their remains brought from London and deposited beside his mother. Someone also tossed in the heart of Percy Bysshe (the only poet named for the sound of a match hitting water), who had drowned off the coast of Italy nearly thirty years before. It was his first visit to Bournemouth, too. So Bournemouth’s most famous (and possibly most crowded) grave contains the last earthly remains of four people who had nothing to do with the place, three of whom never even saw it.