by Bill Bryson
At this point someone stepped up to tell me that one of the children wanted chicken nuggets instead of a Big Mac.
‘Sorry,’ I said and then resumed. ‘Make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers, two chocolate milkshakes—’
At this point, some small person tugging on my sleeve informed me that he wanted a strawberry milkshake, not a chocolate one. ‘Right,’ I said, returning to the young attendant, ‘make that four Big Macs, four quarter-pound cheeseburgers, one chocolate milkshake, one strawberry milkshake, three chicken nuggets …’
And so it went on as I worked my way through and from time to time adjusted the group’s long and complicated order.
When the food came, the young man produced about eleven trays with thirty or forty bags of food on them.
‘What’s this?’ I said.
‘Your order,’ he replied and read my order back to me off the till: ‘Thirty-four Big Macs, twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, twelve chocolate shakes …’ It turned out that instead of adjusting my order each time I restarted, he had just added to it.
‘I didn’t ask for twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers, I asked for four quarter-pound cheeseburgers five times.’
‘Same thing,’ he said.
‘It’s not the same thing at all. You can’t be this stupid.’
Two of the people waiting behind me in the queue sided with the young attendant.
‘You did ask for all that stuff,’ one of them said.
The duty manager came over and looked at the till. ‘It says twenty quarter-pound cheeseburgers here,’ he said as if it were a gun with my fingerprints on it.
‘I know what it says there, but that isn’t what I asked for.’
One of my grown children came over to find out what was going on. I explained to him what had happened and he weighed the matter judiciously and decided that, taken all in all, it was my fault.
‘I can’t believe you are all this stupid,’ I said to an audience that consisted now of about sixteen people, some of them newly arrived but already taking against me. Eventually my wife came over and led me away by the elbow, the way I used to watch her lead jabbering psychiatric patients off to a quiet room. She sorted the mess out amicably with the manager and attendant, brought two trays of food to the table in about thirty seconds, and informed me that I was never again to venture into a McDonald’s whether alone or under supervision.
And now here I was in McDonald’s again for the first time since my earlier fracas. I vowed to behave myself, but McDonald’s is just too much for me. I ordered a chicken sandwich and a Diet Coke.
‘Do you want fries with that?’ the young man serving me asked.
I hesitated for a moment, and in a pained but patient tone said: ‘No. That’s why I didn’t ask for fries, you see.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he said.
‘When I want fries, generally I say something like, “I would like some fries, too, please.” That’s the system I use.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he repeated.
‘Do you need to know the other things I don’t want? It is quite a long list. In fact, it is everything you serve except for the two things I asked for.’
‘We’re just told to ask like,’ he repeated yet again, but in a darker voice, and deposited my two items on a tray and urged me, without the least hint of sincerity, to have a nice day.
I realized that I probably wasn’t quite ready for McDonald’s yet.
The bus service from Bognor Regis to Brighton via Littlehampton is advertised as the Coastliner 700, which makes it sound sleek and stylish, possibly turbo-charged. I imagined myself sitting high above the ground in air-conditioned comfort in a plush velveteen seat, enjoying views over bright sea and rolling countryside through softly tinted glass, the kind so subtly coloured that you feel like turning to the person sitting beside you and saying, ‘Is this glass lightly tinted or is Littlehampton ever so slightly blue?’
In fact, the bus when it wheezed in had none of these features. It was a cramped and airless single-decker filled with hard metal edges and moulded plastic seats. It was the sort of vehicle you would expect to be put on if you were being transferred between prisons. But on the plus side it was cheap – £4.40 for the journey to Hove, which was less than I had spent on a pint of lager in London the night before.
I was still cautiously excited for I was about to travel through a succession of small and, I hoped, charming resorts: Littlehampton, Goring-by-Sea, Angmering, Worthing, Shoreham. I imagined them as the sort of happy villages that you would find in a Ladybird book from the 1950s – high streets with pleasant tearooms and shops with bright striped awnings selling pinwheels and beach balls, and people walking along holding cones with globes of yellow ice cream. But for the longest time – a good hour or more – we never went near the sea or even any identifiable communities. Instead we rolled through an endless clutter of suburbia on bypasses and dual carriageways, passing nothing but superstores (and there’s one of the least correct terms in modern British life), petrol stations, car dealerships and all the other vital ugliness of our age. An earlier passenger had discarded a pair of glossy magazines in the seat pocket beside mine and I lifted one out now in a moment of bored curiosity. It was one of those magazines with a strangely emphatic title – Hello!, OK!, Now!, What Now! Not Now! – and the cover lines all seemed to be about female celebrities who had gained a lot of weight recently, though none that I saw looked exactly sleek to begin with. I had no idea who any of them were, but their lives made fascinating reading. My favourite article – it may be my favourite thing in print ever – concerned an actress who took revenge on her feckless partner by charging a £7,500 vaginal makeover to him. Now that is what I call revenge. But what, pray, do you get with a vaginal makeover? Wi-fi? Sauna? Regrettably, the article failed to specify.
I was hooked. I found myself absorbed in the sumptuously mismanaged lives of celebrities whose common denominators appeared to be tiny brains, giant boobs, and a knack for entering into regrettable relationships. A little further on in the same issue I found the arresting headline ‘Don’t kill your baby for fame!’ This turned out to be a piece of advice from Katie Price (a dead ringer for the late model Jordan, if you ask me) to a rising star named Josie. Ms Price is not a writer to mince words. ‘Listen up, Josie,’ she wrote, ‘I think you’re absolutely disgusting. Having boobs and getting an abortion doesn’t make you famous!’ Though intellectually and emotionally I was inclined to agree with Katie on this point, it did rather seem from the article that Josie was living proof of the contrary.
The photographs of Josie depicted a young woman with breasts like party balloons and lips that brought to mind those floating booms they use to contain oil slicks. According to the article, she was expecting ‘her third son in two months’, which I think we can agree is quite a rate of reproduction even for someone from Essex. The article went on to say that Josie was so disappointed at having another boy and not the girl she had longed for that she had taken up smoking and drinking again as a signal of displeasure to her reproductive system. She was even contemplating having an abortion, which is why Ms Price had leapt so emotionally into the fray. The article noted in passing that young Josie was considering book deals from two publishers. If it turns out that my own publisher is one of them, I will personally burn down their offices.
I hate to sound like an old man, but why are these people famous? What qualities do they possess that endear them to the wider world? We may at once eliminate talent, intelligence, attractiveness and charm from the equation, so what does that leave? Dainty feet? Fresh, minty breath? I am at a loss to say. Anatomically, many of them don’t even seem quite human. Many have names that suggest they have reached us from a distant galaxy: Ri-Ri, Tulisa, Naya, Jai, K-Pez, Chlamydia, Toss-R, Mo-Ron. (I may be imagining some of these.) As I read the magazine, I kept hearing a voice in my head, like the voice from a 1950s B-movie trailer, saying: ‘They came from Planet Imbec
ile!’
From wherever they spring, they exist in droves now. As if to illustrate my point, just beyond Littlehampton a young man with baggy pants and an insouciant slouch boarded the bus and took a seat across from me. He was wearing a baseball cap several sizes too large for his head. Only his outsized ears kept it from falling over his eyes. The bill of the cap was steamrollered flat and still had its shiny, hologram-like price sticker attached. Across the brow in large capitals was the word ‘OBEY’. Earphones were sending booming sound waves through the magnificent interstellar void of his cranium, on a journey to find the distant, arid mote that was his brain. It must have been a little like the hunt for the Higgs boson. If you took all the young men in southern England with those caps and that slouch and collected them all together in one room, you still wouldn’t have enough IQ points to make a halfwit.
I turned to the second magazine, Shut the Fuck Up!. In this one, I learned that Katie Price was not perhaps the paragon of wise counsel that I had to this point assumed. Here we were given a guided tour of Ms Price’s dazzlingly commodious love life. This included three marriages, two broken engagements, several children, and seven other earnest but short-lived commitments – and this was just the most recent fragment of her busy existence. All of Ms Price’s relationships were stupendously unsatisfactory, none more so than the latest. She had married a fellow named Kieran, whose chief talent, I believe, was an ability to make his hair stand up in interesting ways. Not long after they moved into Katie’s 1,100-room mansion, Katie discovered that Kieran had been romping with her very best (now presumably formerly very best) friend. As if this were not enough (and in Ms Price’s world very little ever is), she discovered that another of her very best friends was also road-testing Kieran. Ms Price was understandably furious. I think we could be looking at the Buckingham Palace of vaginal makeovers here.
Turning the page, I found a heartwarming profile of a couple named Sam and Joey, whose talents I was genuinely unable to identify. I would be interested to know if anyone could. Sam and Joey were evidently very successful, for they were looking for a large property in Essex – ‘ideally a castle’, a friend reported. It was at this point that I realized that my brain was dripping on to the pages, so I put the magazine down, and instead watched the passing suburban scene outside my window.
Gradually, helplessly and with many fitful jerks of the head, I lapsed into the deepest of slumbers.
I awoke with a start and found myself in some uncertain place. The bus had stopped beside a town park, large, rectangular and green, and busy with people. It was bounded on three sides by small hotels and apartment buildings, and was open to the sea on the fourth. It was very fetching. Immediately outside my window and running away from the park was a pedestrian lane that looked appealing, too. Perhaps this was Hove. I had heard that Hove was very nice. I stumbled hastily off the bus and wandered about a bit, wondering how I could find out where I was. I couldn’t bring myself to approach anyone and say, ‘Excuse me, where am I?’ so I just wandered until I came to an information board that informed me I was in Worthing.
I explored the pedestrian lane, called Warwick Street, and had a cup of tea, then strolled down to the seafront, which was dominated by a sensationally ugly multi-storey car park. You do wonder what planning officials think. ‘Hey, I’ve got an idea. Instead of having attractive hotels and apartment blocks beside the sea, let’s put up a giant windowless car park. That’ll bring the crowds in!’ I thought about walking the rest of the way to Brighton, but then I realized that what I could see in the hazy uttermost distance was Brighton itself and it was clearly a long way away – more than eight miles, according to my trusty Ordnance Survey map, and that was considerably further than I cared to go on foot just at the moment.
So I got on another bus, all but identical to the first one, and resumed my journey by road. The trip began promisingly enough, but soon the coast road became a long string of scrapyards, builders’ merchants, car repair shops, and finally a giant power station, as we made our way into Shoreham. We got caught in a long tailback because of roadworks and I fell asleep again.
I awoke in Hove, exactly where I wished to be, and exited the bus with my usual stumbling haste. I had recently by chance read about George Everest, the man for whom Mount Everest was named, and learned that he was buried in St Andrew’s churchyard in Hove, and I thought I might look in on his grave. Until I read about old George, I had never paused to wonder how the mountain got its name. It turns out that it should never have been named for him. For one thing, he never saw it. Mountains, in India or elsewhere, hardly played a part in his life at all.
Everest was born in 1790 in either Greenwich or Wales (depending on which sources you follow), the son of a lawyer, and educated at military schools in Marlow and Woolwich before being packed off to the Far East, where he became a surveyor. In 1817, he was sent to Hyderabad, in India, to serve as chief assistant on an enterprise known as the Great Trigonometrical Survey. The aim of the project was to survey an arc of longitude across India as a way of determining the circumference of the Earth. It was the life’s work of an interestingly obscure fellow named William Lambton. Nearly everything about Lambton is uncertain. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says he was born some time in the period 1753 to 1769 – an arrestingly broad range of possibility. Where he grew up is quite unknown, as are all the other details of his early life and education. All that can be said is that in 1781 he joined the army, went to Canada to survey its boundary with the new United States, and then was dispatched to India. There he got the idea of surveying his arc. He worked on it exhaustively for some twenty years before dying abruptly in northern India in 1823 – though exactly where, when and what of are not known. George Everest merely completed the project. It was important work, but it went nowhere near the Himalayas.
Photos of Everest from late in life show a cheerless face almost perfectly encircled by white hair and beard. Life in India didn’t much agree with him. He spent twenty years there more or less constantly unwell, suffering from typhus and chronic bouts of Yellapurum fever and diarrhoea. He spent extended periods at home on sick leave. He returned permanently to England in 1843, long before the mountain was named. It is almost the only mountain in Asia to have an English name. British cartographers were generally fairly scrupulous about preserving native designations, but Mount Everest was known locally by a range of names – Deodhunga, Devadhunga, Bairavathan, Bhairavlangur, Gnalthamthangla, Chomolungma and several more – so there wasn’t one to fix on. The British most commonly called it Peak XV. No one at the time had any idea that it was the tallest mountain in the world, and therefore deserving of special attention, so when someone put Everest’s name on the map it wasn’t intended as a momentous gesture. In the end the trigonometrical survey was found to be largely inaccurate anyway, so Lambton and Everest died having achieved very little.
George Everest, incidentally, didn’t pronounce his name Ev-er-rest, as everyone says it today, but as Eve-rest – just two syllables – so that the mountain is not only misnamed but mispronounced. Everest died aged seventy-six in Hyde Park Gardens, London, but was carted off to Hove for burial. No one knows why. He had no known connection to the town or to any part of Sussex. I was greatly taken with the idea of the most famous mountain in the world being named for a man who had no connection to it and whose name we don’t even pronounce correctly. I think that’s rather splendid.
St Andrew’s is a striking church, large and grey, with a dark, square tower. By the gate stood a large sign saying The Church of St Andrew Welcomes You but the spaces for the vicar’s name, the times of services and the phone number for the churchwarden were blank. Three groups of vagrants occupied the churchyard, drinking and enjoying the sunshine. Two guys in the nearest group were arguing heatedly over something, but I couldn’t tell what. I hunted around among the gravestones, but most inscriptions were weathered to the point of illegibility. Everest’s grave has been exposed to the salty air of
Hove for almost 150 years, so it seemed unlikely it would survive in identifiable form. One of the two arguing fellows stood up and had a pee against the boundary wall. As he did so, he took a simultaneous interest in me, and shouted questions at me over his shoulder in a vaguely hostile manner, asking me what I was looking for.
I told him I was looking for the grave of a man named George Everest. He astounded me by saying, in quite a cultivated voice, ‘Oh, just over there,’ and nodded at some gravestones a few feet from me. ‘They named Mount Everest after him, but he never actually saw it, you know.’
‘So I’ve read.’
‘Stupid fucker,’ he said, a touch ambiguously, and hefted his willy back into his trousers with an air of satisfaction.
And so ended my first day as a tourist in Britain. I presumed that at least some of the following ones would be better.
Chapter 2
Seven Sisters
SOME WOMAN I have never met regularly sends me email alerts telling me how to recognize if I am having a stroke.
‘If you feel a tingling in your fingers,’ one will say, ‘you could be having A STROKE. Seek medical attention AT ONCE.’ (The alerts come with lots of italics and abrupt capitalizations, presumably to underline how serious a matter this is.) Another will say: ‘If you sometimes can’t remember where you parked your car in a multi-storey car park, you are probably HAVING A STROKE. Go to an emergency room IMMEDIATELY.’
The uncanny thing about these messages is how accurately they apply to me. I have every one of the symptoms and there are hundreds of them. Every couple of days I learn of a new one.
‘If you think you might be producing more ear wax than usual …’
‘If you sometimes sneeze unexpectedly …’
‘If you have had toast at any time in the last six months …’
‘If you celebrate your birthday on the same date every year …’
