Bill Bryson: 'I do think Britain is a perfect size'

Bill Bryson’s new travel book The Road to Little Dribbling was published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of his modern classic Notes From a Small Island, judged in a BBC poll to be the book that best represented England.

Having taken a new journey round Britain to see what has changed, Bryson joined John Mullan at Guardian book club event to talk about the things that have changed - and those that have not.

People are more selfish now - but not as selfish as Americans

Bryson says Britain has changed enormously over the last four decades - “mostly for the good”. Looking back to when he first arrived, he says Britain was poor nation then, but believes there now is “a kind of self-absorption” that didn’t use to exist and that a certain selfishness has crept in.

Britons aren’t, however, very good at it, he added – as opposed to Americans, who, for example, are great at bringing inappropriately huge suitcases to airplanes knowing they’ll be blocking out space for other travellers – without any sense of shame at all.

Size is everything

In the same way European travellers are usually overwhelmed by the vastness of everything in America, as a new arrival from the US, Bryson found everything tiny. But for him, the size of the country – and everything in it – creates a more profound sense of cultural community.

“I do think Britain is a perfect size, and that is something that people don’t reflect upon very much,” he says. “It’s a perfect size in that you have enough people to have a critical mass that you can have a completely independent culture. If all the rest of the world vanished tomorrow, you’d still have good theatre, novels and good surgeons and good universities and all the things that any society ought to provide.”

He says Britain has a cosy and familial feel to it. “Wherever you are in the country, when you turn on the news, we’re all watching Fiona Bruce, or Huw Edwards, or whatever. Lots of shared experiences. In a country the size of the US or Australia you cannot have that.”

Pleasure is a deckchair in a winter wind

Bryson said he’s constantly astounded by how cheerful the British are - sometimes despite less than satisfactory conditions. Mullan recalled a passage from Notes From A Small Island when Bryson was in Christchurch, Dorset, and found a couple wrapped in blankets sitting in front of their beach hut.

“All the beach huts along the beachfront were closed up for winter except this one,” recalls Bryson. “There was this couple – the man was trying to read a newspaper and the wind was wrapping it around his face. It was the most challenging possible conditions to be happy and comfortable, and they were clearly, transparently failing at it – and yet they were happy as anything! Because this is the British when they’re relaxing. And I genuinely love and admire that business of liking small pleasures and making the most of little things.”

Coming from America, he said, this mystified him for years, and he finds it one of the most attractive features of the British. “If you’re going to have fun in America, you have to invest a lot of money and buy equipment. They British are so easy to please, and I mean that in an entirely admiring way.”

No such thing as a straight road

“Nothing gives the British more pleasure than discussing how to get from here to somewhere else,” said Bryson, adding that he has yet to find a straight road in London. “That’s especially true of British men – and particularly in pubs,” he said. In Notes from a Small Island Bryson dissects with astonishment the amusing conversations between men that he would overhear – and he revisits the topic in a section of his new book that, Mullan said, is worth the cover price alone.

A baffling love of animals - even poodles

In Notes from a Small Island Bryson comes across an impressive building, which is dedicated to the headquarters of the Cat Protection League (now rebaptised as Cats Protection). “The British and their love of animals is something that I don’t entirely share,” confessed Bryson. “I’m on the record as suggesting that I wouldn’t be the least bit disturbed if all the dogs on the planet were rounded up and put on some large sack and taken to some distant place like Greenland and just left there - except poodles. Poodles I would shoot.”

The Guardian book club is staged as part of the Guardian Live programme. Find out how to join Guardian Members what else is coming up.