Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

There was a notice on the counter saying that the office booked rooms, so I asked the helpful lady if she would secure me lodgings.

She interviewed me candidly with regard to how much I was prepared to pay, which I always find embarrassing and frankly unEnglish, and by a process of attrition we established that I fell into a category that could be called cheap but demanding. It happened that the Royal Clarence was doing a special deal with rooms at .25 a night if you promised not to steal the towels, and I leapt at that because I'd passed it on the way in and it looked awfully nice, a big white Georgian place on the cathedral square. And so it proved to be. The room was newly decorated and big enough for hotelroom Olympics wastebin basketball, furniture steeplechase, jumping on to the bed by means of a swing on the bathroom door and a welltimed leap, and other perennial favourites of the lone traveller. I had a short but vigorous workout, showered, changed and hit the streets famished.

Exeter is not an easy place to love. It was extensively bombed during the war, which gave the city fathers a wonderful opportunity, enthusiastically seized, to rebuild most of it in concrete. It was only a little after six in the evening, but the city centre was practically dead. I wandered around beneath gloomy street lights, looking in shop windows and reading those strange posters bills, as they are known in the trade that you always find for provincial newspapers. I have an odd fascination with these because they are always either wholly unfathomable to nonlocals ('Letter Box Rapist Strikes Again', 'Beulah Flies Home') or so boring that you can't imagine how anyone could possibly have thought they would boost sales ('Council Storm Over Bins Contract', 'Phone Box Vandals Strike Again'). My favourite this is a real one, which I saw many years ago in Hemel Hempstead was 'Woman, 81, Dies'.

Perhaps I took all the wrong streets, but there seemed to be no restaurants anywhere in central Exeter. I was only looking for something modest that didn't have 'Fayre', 'Vegan' or 'Copper Kettle' in the title, but all that happened was I kept wandering down restaurantless streets and coming up against monstrous relief roads with massive roundabouts and complicated pedestrian crossings that clearly weren't designed to be negotiated on foot by anyone with less than six hours to spare. Finally, I happened on a hilly street with a few modest eateries and plunged randomly into a Chinese restaurant. I can't say why exactly, but Chinese restaurants make me oddly uneasy, particularly when I am dining alone. I always feel that the waitress is saying: 'One beef satay and fried rice for the imperialist dog at table five.' And I find chopsticksfrankly distressing. Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back 3,000 years, haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food? I spent a perplexed hour stabbing at rice, dribbling sauce across the tablecloth and lifting finely poised pieces of meat to my mouth only to discover that they had mysteriously vanished and weren't to be found anywhere. By the time I finished, the table looked as if it had been at the centre of a violent argument. I paid my bill in shame and slunk out the door and back to the hotel where I watched a little TV and snacked on the copious leftovers that I found in sweater folds and trouser turnups.

In the morning, I rose early and went out for a look round the town. Exeter was locked in a foggy gloom that didn't do anything for its appearance, though the cathedral square was very handsome and the cathedral, I was impressed to find, was open even at eight in the morning. I sat for some time at the back and listened to the morning choir practice, which was quite wonderful. Then I wandered down to the old quay area to see what I might find there. It had been artily renovated with shops and museums, but all of them were closed at this time of day or perhaps this time of year and there wasn't a soul about.

By the time I returned to the High Street, the shops were opening. I hadn't had breakfast because it wasn't included in my special room rate, so I was feeling immoderately peckish and began a hunt for cafes, but again Exeter seemed strangely lacking. In the end, I went into Marks & Spencer to buy a sandwich.

Although the store had only just opened, the food hall was busy and there were long queues at the tills. I took a place in a line behind eight other shoppers. They were all women and they all did the same mystifying thing: they acted surprised when it came time to pay. This is something that has been puzzling me for years. Women will stand there watching their items being rung up, and then when the till lady says, That's fourtwenty, love,' or whatever, they suddenly look as if they've never done this sort of thing before. They go 'Oh!' and start rooting in a flustered fashion in their handbag for their purse or chequebook, as if noone had told them that this might happen.

Men, for all their many shortcomings, like washing large pieces of oily machinery in the kitchen sink or forgetting that a painted door stays wet for more than thirty seconds, are generally pretty good when it comes to paying. They spend their time in line doing a wallet inventory and sorting through their coins. When the till person announces the bill, they immediately hand over an approximately correct amount of money, keep their hand extended for the change however long it takes or foolish they may begin to look if there is, say, a problem with the till roll, and then mark this pocket their change as they walk away instead of deciding that now is the time to search for the car keys and reorganize six months' worth of receipts.

And while we're on this rather daring sexist interlude, why is it that women never push toothpaste tubes up from the bottom and always try to get somebody else to change a lightbulb? How are they able to smell and hear things that are so clearly beyond the range of human acuity, and how do they know from another room that you are about to dip a finger into the icing of a freshly made cake? Why, above all, do they find it so unsettling if you spend more than four minutes a day on the toilet? This last is another longstanding mystery to me. A woman of my close acquaintance and I regularly have surreal conversations that run something like this: 'What are you doing in there?' (This said in an edgy tone.) 'I'm descaling the kettle. What do you think I'm doing in here?' 'You've been in there half an hour. Are you reading?'

'No.'

'You're reading, aren't you? I can hear the pages.' 'Honestly, I'm not.' That is to say, I was reading until a minute ago but now, of course, I'm talking to you, dear.

'Have you covered up the keyhole? I can't see anything.' 'Please tell me that you're not down on your hands and knees trying to look through the keyhole at your husband having a bowel movement in his own bathroom. Please.'

'You come out of there now. You've been in there for nearly threequarters of an hour just reading.'

As she retreats, you sit there thinking, Did all that really just happen or have I wandered into a Dada exhibition? And then, shaking your head, you return to your magazine.

Still, it must be said that women are great with children, vomit and painted doors three months after a painted door has dried they will still be touching it as if suspecting it might turn on them which makes up for a lot, so I smiled benignly at the parade offlustered ladies ahead of me until it was my turn to demonstrate to the ones following how to do this sort of thing properly, but frankly I don't think they took it in.

I ate my sandwich on the street, then returned to the hotel, gathered up my things, settled the bill, stepped back outdoors and thought: Now what? I wandered back to the rail station and had a look at the flickering television screens. I thought about catching a train to Plymouth or Penzance but the next one wasn't for a couple of hours. There was, however, a train to Barnstaple leaving shortly. It occurred to me that I could go there and then make my way by bus along the north Devon coast to Taunton or Minehead. I could stop en route at Lynton and Lynmouth, and possibly Porlock and Dunster. It seemed a capital idea.