Perhaps I became an Anglophile because I grew up in the British Occupied Zone of post-war West Germany where the little Tommy kids joined us in our tobogganing with their frost-bitten knees sticking pitifully out from their khaki shorts. We had not much to wear either in war-ravaged Germany but at least we had the good sense of wearing full-length albeit badly patched long trousers.
All my favourite travel writers are dead now, but of the living ones, Bill Bryson, now living in the U.K., is without argument by far the best (on second thoughts, Paul Theroux may still beat him by a whisker). His "Neither Here Nor There", "Notes from a Big Country", "Down Under", and "Notes from a Small Island" - click here - are total delights to read.
If you have read "Notes from a Small Island", you simply must read its sequel "The Road to Little Dribbling", written twenty years later after he made a brand-new journey around Britain to see what had changed.
Once again, with his matchless homing instinct for the funniest and quirkiest, his unerring eye for the idiotic, the endearing, the ridiculous and the scandalous, Bryson gives us an acute and perceptive insight into all that is best and worst about Britain today.
Having read and enjoyed the book, I'm thinking of now also buying the audiobook to listen to in bed on a cold and wintry night at "Riverbend".
Why think? It's done! Fourteen hours of listening pleasure awaits me.
When you're hot, you're hot, and so I have also ordered Bill Bryson's "Mother Tongue", "Notes from a Small Island", and "Sunburnt Country".
