Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

Goodness me! What an outburst! Let's lighten up and go look at some good things. The Ashmolean, for instance. What a wonderful institution, the oldest public museum on Planet Earth and certainly one of the finest. How is it that it is always so empty? I spent a long morning there politely examining the antiquities, and had the place all to myself but for a party of schoolchildren who could occasionally be sighted racing between rooms pursued by a harriedlooking teacher, then strolled over to the PittRivers and University museums, which are also very agreeable in their quaint, welcometothe1870s sort of way. I trawled through Blackwell's and Dillon's, poked about at Balliol and Christ Church, ambled through University Parks and Christ Church Meadow, ranged out through Jericho and the stolid, handsome mansions of north Oxford.

Perhaps I'm too hard on poor old Oxford. I mean, it is basically a wonderful place, with its smoky pubs and bookshops and scholarly air, as long as you fix your gaze on the good things and never go anywhere near Cornmarket or George Street. I particularly like it at night when the traffic dies away enough that you don't need an oxygen mask and the High Street fills up with those mysteriously popular doner kebab vans, which tempt me not (how can anyone eat something that looks so uncannily as if it has been carved from a dead man's leg?) but do have a kind of seductive Hopperish glow about them. I like the darkness of the back lanes that wander between high walls, where you half expect to be skewered and dismembered by Jack the Ripper or possibly a doner kebab wholesaler. I like wandering up St Giles to immerse myself in the busy conviviality of Brown's Restaurant a wonderful, friendly place where, perhaps uniquely in Britain, you can get an excellent Caesar salad and a bacon cheeseburger without having to sit among pounding music and a lot of ersatz Route 66 signs. Above all, I like to drink in the pubs, where you can sit with a book and not be looked on as a social miscreant, and be among laughing, lively young people and lose yourself in reveries of what it was like when you too had energy and a flat stomach and thought of sex as something more than a welcome chance for a liedown. I'd impetuously said I would stay for three nights when I booked into my hotel, and by midmorning of the third day I was beginning to feel a little restless, so I decided to have a walk to Sutton Courtenay for no reason other than that George Orwell is buried there and it seemed about the right distance. I walked out of the city by way of a water meadow to North Hinksey and onwards towards Boar's Hill through an area called, with curious indecisiveness, Chilswell Valley or Happy Valley. It had rained in the night and the heavy clay soil stuck to my boots and made the going arduous. Soon I had an accumulation of mud that doubled the size of my feet. A bit further on the path had been covered with loose chippings, presumably to make the going easier, but in fact the chippings stuck to my muddy boots so that it looked as if I were walking around with two very large currant buns on my feet. At the top of Boar's Hill I stopped to savour the viewit's the one that led Matthew Arnold to spout that overwrought nonsense about 'dreaming spires', and it has been cruelly despoiled by those marching electricity pylons which Oxfordshire has in greater abundance than any county I know and to scrape the mud from my boots with a stick.

Boar's Hill has some appealing big houses but I don't think I could happily settle there. I noted three driveways with signs saying 'No Turning'. Now tell me, just how petty do you have to be, how ludicrously possessive of your little piece of turf, to put up a sign like that? What harm can there possibly be in some lost or misdirected person turning a car round in the edge of your driveway? I always make a point of turning round in such driveways, whether I need to or not, and I urge you to join me in this practice. It is always a good idea to toot your horn two or three times to make sure that the owner sees you. Also, while I think of it, can I ask you to tear up your junk mail, particularly when that mail invites you to take on more debt, and return it to the sender in the postpaid envelope? It would make a far more effective gesture if there were thousands of us doing it.

I reached Abingdon by way of a back lane from Sunningwell. Abingdon had one of the bestkept council estates I think I've ever seen huge sweeps of lawn and neat houses and a handsome town hall built on stilts as if somebody was expecting a fortyday flood, but that's as much as I'm prepared to say for Abingdon. It has the most appalling shopping precinct, which I later learned had been created by sweeping away a raft of medieval houses, and a kind of dogged commitment to ugliness around its fringes. Sutton Courtenay seemed considerably further on than I recalled it from the map, but it was a pleasant walk with frequent views of the Thames. It is a charming place, with some fine homes, three agreeablelooking pubs, and a little green with a war memorial, beside which stands the churchyard where not only George Orwell lies, but also H.H. Asquith. Call me a perennial Iowa farmboy, but 1 never fail to be impressed by how densely packed with worthies is this little island. How remarkable it is that in a single village churchyard you find the graves of two men of global stature. We in Iowa would be proud of either one of them indeed, we would be proud of Trigger the Wonder Horse or the guy who invented traffic cones or pretty much anyone at all.

I walked into the graveyard and found Orwell's grave. It had three straggly rose bushes growing out of it and some artificial flowers in a glass jar, before a simple stone with a curiously terse inscription:

Here Lies Eric Arthur Blair Born June 25th 1903 • Died January 21st 1950

Not much sentiment there, what? Near by was the grave of Herbert Henry Asquith. It was one of those teacaddy tombs, and it was sinking into the ground in an alarming manner. His inscription too was mysteriously to the point. It said simply:

Earl of Oxford and Asquith Prime Minister of England April 1908 to December 1916

Born 12 September 1852

Died 15 February 1928

Notice anything odd there? I bet you did if you are Scottish or Welsh. The whole place was a bit strange. I mean to say, here was a cemetery containing the grave of a famous author that was made as anonymous as if he had been buried a pauper, and another of a man whose descendants had apparently forgotten exactly what he was Prime Minister of and which looked seriously in danger of being swallowed by the earth. Next to Asquith lay one Ruben Loveridge 'who fell asleep 29th April 1950' and near by was agrave shared by two men: 'Samuel Lewis 18811930' and 'Alan Slater 19241993'. What an intriguing little community this was a place where men are entombed together and they bury you if you fall asleep.

On second thought, I think we lowans would be content to let you keep Orwell and Asquith as long as we could have the guy who was buried alive.

I SUSPENDED MY PRINCIPLES AND HIRED A CAR FOR THREE DAYS. WELL, I had to. I wanted to see the Cotswolds and it doesn't take long to work out that you can't see the Cotswolds unless you have your own motive power. As long ago as 1933, J.B. Priestley was noting in English Journey that even then, in those golden preBeeching days, there was just one line through the Cotswolds. Now there isn't even that, except for one that runs uselessly along the edges.

So I hired a car in Oxford and set off with that giddying sense of unbounded possibility that comes when I find myself in charge of two tons of unfamiliar metal. My experience with hire cars is that generally they won't let you leave a city until they have had a chance to say goodbye to most of it. Mine took me on a long tour through Botley and Hinkley, on a nostalgic swing past the Rover works at Cowley and out through Blackbird Leys before conveying me twice around a roundabout and flinging me, like a spacecraft in planetary orbit, back towards town. I was powerless to do anything about this, largely because my attention was preoccupied with trying to turn off the back windscreen wiper, which seemed to have a mind of its own, and figuring out how to remove an opaque cloud of foamy washing fluid from the front windscreen, which shot out in great obscuring streams irrespective of which switch I pushed or stalk I waggled.