Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

I pottered about for a bit among the shopping streets, then followed some back lanes down to the waterfront, where there was a lonely fish warehouse marooned in an acre of empty car park and a vast empty beach with thunderous crashing waves. The air was fresh and vigorously abundant in the blowy way of the seaside, and the world was bathed in an ethereal northern light that gave the sea a curious luminescence indeed, gave everything an odd, faint bluish cast that intensified my sense of being a long way from home.

At the far end of the beach there stood a spectral tower, a fragment of old castle, and I set off to investigate. A rocky stream stood between me and it, so I had to backtrack to a footbridge some distance from the beach, then pick my way along a muddy path liberally strewn with litter. The castle tower was derelict, its lower windows and door openings bricked over. A notice beside it announced that the coastal path was closed because of soil erosion. I stood for a long time by this little headland gazing out to sea, then turned to face the town and wondered what to do next.

Thurso was to be my home for the next three days and I wasn't at all sure how I was going to fill such an expanse of empty time. Between the smell of sea air and the sense of utter remoteness, I had a moment of quiet panic at finding myself alone here at the top of the earth, where there was noone to talk to and the most exciting diversion was an old brickedup tower. I wandered back into town the way I had come and, for want of anything better to do, had another pottering look in the shop windows. And then, outside a greengrocer's, it happened something that sooner or later always happens to me on a long trip away from home. It is a moment I dread.I started asking myself unanswerable questions.

Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I've seen it in others often. Some solitary travellers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think noone else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering for an uncomfortably long period before finally departing. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhoea. I ask private, internal questions scores and scores of them for which I cannot supply answers. And so as I stood by a greengrocer's in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? and I knew that the process had started.

It's not a bad question, as these things go. I mean to say, why do they call it a grapefruit? I don't know about you, but if someone presented me with an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, the size of a cannonball and tasted sour I don't believe I would think: Well, you know, it rather puts me in mind of a grape.

The trouble is that once these things start there is no stopping them. A couple of doors away was a shop that sold jumpers and I thought: Why do the British call them jumpers? I've actually been wondering this for years, off and on, usually in lonely places like Thurso, and I would sincerely like to know. Do they make you want to jump? Do you think to yourself when you put one on in the morning: Now not only shall I be warm all day, no small consideration in a nation where central heating still cannot be assumed, but if I should be required to do some jumping I shall be suitably attired.

And so it went on. I proceeded through the streets under a meteor shower of interrogations. Why do they call them milk floats? They don't float at all. Why do we foot a bill rather than, say, head it? Why do we say that our nose is running'} (Mine slides.) Who ate the first oyster and how on earth did anyone ever figure out that ambergris would make an excellent fixative for perfumes?

When this happens, I know from years of experience, it takes a special distraction to shock the mind from this solitary torment, H fortunately Thurso had one. On a sidestreet, as I was just beginning to wonder why we say we are head over heels when we rehappy when in fact our head normally is over our heels, I happened on an extraordinary little establishment called the Fountain Restaurant, which offered three complete but different menus a Chinese menu, an Indian menu and a 'European' menu. Thurso evidently couldn't maintain three separate restaurants, so it had one restaurant offering three kinds of cuisines.

Immediately taken with this concept, I went in and was shown to a table by a pretty young lady who left me with a menu that ran to many pages. It was apparent from the title page that all three kinds of meals were cooked by a single Scottish chef, so I pored through the entries hoping to find 'sweetandsour oatcakes' or 'haggis vindaloo', but the dishes were strictly conventional. I opted for Chinese, then sat back and enjoyed a state of blissful mindlessness.

When it came, the food tasted, I have to say, like a Chinese meal cooked by a Scottish chef which is not to say that it wasn't good. It was just curiously unlike any Chinese meal I had ever had. The more I ate it the more I liked it. At least it was different, and that, by this stage of the trip, was all I craved.

When I emerged, I felt much better. Lacking anything better to do, I strolled back down to the vicinity of the fish warehouse to take the evening air. As I stood there in the darkness, listening to the pounding surf and gazing contentedly at the great starry dome of sky above me, I thought, Who decided that Hereford and Worcester would make a zippy name for a county? and I knew then that it was time for bed.

In the morning, I was roused early by my alarm clock and rose reluctantly, for I was having my favourite dream the one where I own a large, remote island, not unlike those off this section of Scottish coast, to which I invite carefully selected people, like the guy who invented the Christmas tree lights that go out when one bulb blows, the person in charge of escalator maintenance at Heathrow Airport, nearly anyone who has ever written a user's manual for a personal computer, and of course John Selwyn Gummer, let them loose with a very small amount of survival rations, and then go out with braying dogs and mercilessly hunt them down but then I remembered that I had a big, exciting day in front of me. I was going to John O'Groats. I had been hearing about John O'Groats for years, but I had notthe faintest idea of what it would be like. It seemed exotic beyond words and I ached to see it. So I breakfasted in a spirit of keenness at the Pentland Hotel, the only person in the dining room, and then repaired at the stroke of nine to William Dunnet's, the local Ford dealer, where I had arranged by phone some days earlier to hire a car for the day, since there was no other way to get to John O'Groats at this time of year.

It took the man in the showroom a moment to recall the arrangement. 'Ah, you're the chap from down south,' he said, remembering, which threw me a little. It isn't often you hear Yorkshire referred to as down south.

'Isn't every place down south from here?' I asked.

'Yes. Why, yes, I suppose it is,' he said as if I had stumbled on a rare profundity.

He was a friendly fellow everyone in Thurso is friendly and while he scratched away at the voluminous paperwork that would put me in charge of two tons of dangerous metal, we chatted amiably about life in this remote outpost of civilization. He told me it took sixteen hours to drive to London, not that anyone much ever did. For most people, Inverness, four hours to the south by car, was the southern limit of the known world.