notes from a small island
Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island, Black Swan, 1995
In the morning I awoke to find rain falling over the hills in great blown sheets. I breakfasted, settled the bill and spent a protracted period struggling into waterproofs in the front hallway. It’s a funny thing. I dress myself most days without incident, but give me a pair of waterproof trousers to put on and it’s as if I’ve never stood unaided. I spent twenty minutes crashing into walls and furniture, falling into pot plants and, in one particularly notable outburst, hopping on one leg for some 15 feet before wrapping my neck around a newel post.
When at last I was fully kitted out, I caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length wall mirror and realized I looked uncannily like a large blue condom. Thus attired and accompanied with each step by an irritating rustle of nylon, I picked up my rucksack and walking-stick and took to the hills. I proceeded up Hambury Tout, past Durdle Door and the steep-sided valley engagingly called Scratchy Bottom, and on up a steep, muddy, zigzagging path to a lonely, fog-shrouded eminence called Swyre Head. The weather was appalling and the rain maddening.
Indulge me for a moment, if you will. Drum on the top of your head with the fingers of both hands and see how long it takes before either it gets seriously on your nerves or everyone in the vicinity is staring at you. In either case, you will find that you are happy to stop it. Now imagine those drumming fingers are raindrops endlessly beating on your hood and that there’s nothing you can do about it, and moreover that your glasses are two circles of steamy uselessness, that you are slipping around on a rain-slickened path a single misstep from a long fall to a rocky beach – a fall that would reduce you to little more than a smear on a piece of rock, like jam on bread. I imagined the headline – “American writer dies in fall; was leaving country anyway” – and plodded on, squinting Magoo-like, with feelings of foreboding.
In the morning I awoke to find rain falling over the hills in great blown sheets. I breakfasted, settled the bill and spent a protracted period struggling into waterproofs in the front hallway. It’s a funny thing. I dress myself most days without incident, but give me a pair of waterproof trousers to put on and it’s as if I’ve never stood unaided. I spent twenty minutes crashing into walls and furniture, falling into pot plants and, in one particularly notable outburst, hopping on one leg for some 15 feet before wrapping my neck around a newel post.
When at last I was fully kitted out, I caught a glimpse of myself in a full-length wall mirror and realized I looked uncannily like a large blue condom. Thus attired and accompanied with each step by an irritating rustle of nylon, I picked up my rucksack and walking-stick and took to the hills. I proceeded up Hambury Tout, past Durdle Door and the steep-sided valley engagingly called Scratchy Bottom, and on up a steep, muddy, zigzagging path to a lonely, fog-shrouded eminence called Swyre Head. The weather was appalling and the rain maddening.
Indulge me for a moment, if you will. Drum on the top of your head with the fingers of both hands and see how long it takes before either it gets seriously on your nerves or everyone in the vicinity is staring at you. In either case, you will find that you are happy to stop it. Now imagine those drumming fingers are raindrops endlessly beating on your hood and that there’s nothing you can do about it, and moreover that your glasses are two circles of steamy uselessness, that you are slipping around on a rain-slickened path a single misstep from a long fall to a rocky beach – a fall that would reduce you to little more than a smear on a piece of rock, like jam on bread. I imagined the headline – “American writer dies in fall; was leaving country anyway” – and plodded on, squinting Magoo-like, with feelings of foreboding.