Read Online Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online Page A

only opens three inches, so you just sort of throw the ticket at the dashboard (it flutters to the floor but your wife doesn't notice so you say, 'Fuck it,' and lock the door), and squeeze back out where your wife sees what a scruff you've turned into after she spent all that time dressing you and beats the dust from you with paddled hands while saying, 'Honestly, I can't take you anywhere.'
And that's just the beginning. Arguing quietly, you have to find your way out of this dank hellhole via an unmarked door leading to a curious chamber that seems to be a composite of dungeon and urinal, or else wait two hours for the world's most abused and unreliable-looking lift, which will only take two people and already has two people in it - a man whose wife is beating dust from his new Marks & Spencer jacket and berating him in clucking tones.
And the remarkable thing is that everything about this process is intentionally - mark this, intentionally - designed to flood your life with unhappiness. From the tiny parking bays that can only be got into by manoeuvring your car through a forty-six-point turn (why can't the spaces be angled, for crying out loud?) to the careful placing of pillars where they will cause maximum obstruction, to the ramps that are so dark and narrow and badly angled that you always bump the kerb, to the remote, wilfully unhelpful ticket machines (you can't tell me that a machine that can recognize and reject any foreign coin ever produced couldn't make change if it wanted to) - all of this is designed to make this the most dispiriting experience of your adult life. Did you know - this is a little-known fact but absolute truth - that when they dedicate a new multi-storey car park the Lord Mayor and his wife have a ceremonial pee in the stairwell? It's true.
And that's just one tiny part of the driving experience. There areall the other manifold annoyances of motoring, like National Express drivers who pull out in front of you on motorways, eight-mile-long contraflow systems erected so that some guys on a crane can change a lightbulb, traffic lights on busy roundabouts that never let you advance more than twenty feet at a time, motorway service areas where you have to pay £4.20 for a minipot of coffee and a jacket potato with a sneeze of cheddar in it and there's no point in going to the shop because the men's magazines are all sealed in plastic and you don't need any Waylon Jennings Highway Hits tapes, morons with caravans who pull out of side-roads just as you approach, some guy in a Morris Minor going 11 mph through the Lake District and collecting a three-mile following because, apparently, he's always wanted to lead a parade, and other challenges to your patience and sanity nearly beyond endurance. Motorized vehicles are ugly and dirty and they bring out the worst in people. They clutter every kerbside, turn ancient market squares into disorderly jumbles of metal, spawn petrol stations, secondhand car lots, Kwik-Fit centres and other dispiriting blights. They are horrible and awful and I wanted nothing to do with them on this trip. And besides, my wife wouldn't let me have the car.
Thus it was that I found myself late on a grey Saturday afternoon, on an exceptionally long and empty train bound for Windsor. I sat high on the seat in an empty carriage, and in fading daylight watched as the train slid past office blocks and out into the forests of council flats and snaking terrace houses of Vauxhall and Clapham. At Twickenham, I discovered why the train was so long and so empty. The platform was jammed solid with men and boys in warm clothes and scarves carrying glossy programmes and little bags with tea flasks peeping out: obviously a rugby crowd from the Twickenham grounds. They boarded with patience and without pushing, and said sorry when they bumped . or inadvertently impinged on someone else's space. I admired this instinctive consideration for others, and was struck by what a regular thing that is in