An Audience with Bill Bryson

good evening ladies and gentlemen good evening and welcome and a particularly of course to the guests of the University today's been a very special day for a number of reasons we have named formally the angle brief boardroom in the law school we have named our library with its brand new extension the Bill Bryson library and Bill and I have just got back from a lecture in University College in Castle by Sir Harold Evans alumnus of this university about something which I think many of us think is slightly historic integrity in journalism but he was one of and still is a wonderful supporter of Durham University and what it's done for his career we've now got I think the highlight of the day which is perhaps not the last but one nearly the last of one of our many farewells to Bill thanking him for all he has done for this university and Bill is going to give us an audience with Bill Bryson he needs no introduction of course to us so welcome well thank you very much Chris thank you and I'm thinking you for having me back I I guess I'm a little bit like herpes I just keep coming back but I'm thrilled to be here delighted always to be back in Durham this has been just the best day of my life and you know having a library named after you is honest don't get any better or more exciting than that so really this is just tremendously exciting for me but it's always a pleasure to be here now I don't know quite what you had in mind for me we didn't really discuss very much what I was going to do here my instructions are just to keep you in here and keep you quiet for an hour so what I thought I would do is just a couple of things I thought first of all I would like to tell you my bear story because I always tell this bear story Chris can tell it for me because he's heard at least 150 times there but I don't care I'm still gonna tell it and then I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about why I like you so much and because that always goes down well here and because the first time I said nice things about Durham they gave me an honorary degree and then the second time I came back and said more nice things and they made me Chancellor so I kept saying nice things and then into library after me so I my goal now I suppose is to have the county renamed after me as I anyway I'm very happy to keep saying nice things about you because you are really lovely people so I thought it would just be to talk about that and then I thought it would read a couple of passages from short passages from my books and finally take questions if if you have any for me so let me start with the best or the best story is just something I sort of kind of limbering up exercise for me with the bear story it's an outgrowth of the experience I had a few years ago where I tried very foolishly tried to walk the Appalachian Trail in America with a companion named Steven Katz the Appalachian Trail is really really hard it's the longest long-distance footpath in the world and it goes for 2,200 miles through 14 eastern states from Springer Mountain in Georgia all the way up to Mount Katahdin in Maine and it really is very very hard and if you happen to read the book you'll know that I grew genuinely concerned about the dangers of bear attacks while hiking in the eastern woods in the United States and with some justification because bears do sometimes attack and it's very very gratified to discover after the book came out the people all over North America shared these concerns because I got letters by the sackful from people giving me advice on how to avoid bear attacks while hiking and here the basic advice seems to be always to go hiking with someone who can't run as fast as you can but the letter I got got a letter from someone in New Hampshire where I was then living that particularly pleased B and she told me that when you go hiking out west in grizzly bear country there are two things they tell you you should do wherever you go they tell you that first of all you should wear little bells on your clothing because this actually alerts the Bears you're coming and you don't overtake them by surprise and the second thing they tell you you should do is wherever you go you should look out for grizzly bear scat or dung on the ground in front of you and the way you can recognize grizzly bear scat is that it has little bells in it now so I promised to talk to you a little bit about why I like you service in it I I have thought about this a lot of it is because it was you know the sort of the theme of my congregation speeches time after time and and there are whole bunch of reason saying and as pricing it they really don't have a lot to do with academic life the you know I mean I know you're smart and I admire you very much for that but you wouldn't be a term if you weren't smart and the thing that makes them special both is a kind of place in this an institution is that there's other things here then especially the things that people do at the University that really really seriously genuinely have just bowled me over again and again in the time that I have been closely exposed to what you do here and I think the thing that it impressed me above all else is just how expertly you have fun here and there is it really true I've never been anyplace where people do other things in their spare times I mean as well as being you know scholars and working really hard towards degrees and everything you do all of this other stuff and you always do it incredibly well like then impress so many times you just I've gone to too Kaylee's and fashion shows and and various stage presentations and and heard during the university light off for a group and just and everything I've ever heard everything every performance I've ever seen jazz bands and swing orchestras and all kinds of things it's always been done really to to a more or less professional standard and I genuinely think that just there's nowhere else in the world that could compare with Durham in terms of that presentational skills just to kind of depth of talent that you see when you're here and I had this brought home to me really emphatically the most wonderful and heartwarming way a years ago when as some of you may know Russell Crowe so a big Hollywood star came here to give an acting workshop to Durham student theatre group and I don't know if this is still well-known but he came and it was really it was obviously a very unusual thing very exciting and the reason he came with the background to the story is kind of a long story but I got to know him slightly a few years ago through some work I was doing and we had it I did in London probably about five or six years ago I've just met for dinner one night and it was a really nice eat you know we had a good time and in the course of this slightly lightly drunken evening he said to me he's because I had had not long since become Chancellor and he had heard about that he said to me he said I cannot I'll come up to Durham and do a workshop with the students there for the drama students and I thought yeah he will you know I didn't take it seriously though I thought he's just talking and I didn't really ever think anything more about it and then in 2011 I retired announced that I was retiring as as as Chancellor and completely out of the blue or totally unexpectedly I got he got in touch with me and he said I see you stepping down at time so if we're gonna do this workshop what are we gonna do it okay so you kidding yes when and he said well now he said I'm coming to England in a couple of weeks so you set it up and I'll come up I'm making some extra time and I'll come up to him and do a workshop instead of course we did everything necessary to pitch is kind of with hysterical haste a whole bunch of people put together all of the things that were necessary in order to accommodate Russell Crowe and make things work for him and get some of the best students and Durham student theater together and he came up with his Thursday night in April he arrived in to him and we met for dinner to discuss about what was going to happen the next day and this has all happened so quickly there hadn't had really time to reflect upon it at all and he said to me in the course of the evening I said so what do you want to do tomorrow exactly how do you want to do this and he said he didn't really care just as long as he was going to be with working with this I think they'd identified I can't have a 15 or 16 students but working with students who are really serious about drama and we studied drama full time and we're going to go in and have a career on the stage with theatre or something like that and I was just sort of flabbergasted because I didn't it hadn't occurred to me that he didn't know we don't have a drama department that I don't and that these people were you know they weren't studied drama they were studying botany and geophysics and Modern Languages and things like that that they would was something they did in their spare time I don't know this could be just disaster sir this could be this could be the worst thing that's ever happened to me and I didn't tell the students about this either because I didn't want to freak them out so I just let them all get together the next morning this drama workshop but it was a private affair between Russell and these students and I just thought God you know if one thing goes right my life let it be this thing and they met and so they were they were in in a couple of hours at least all together behind closed doors so no idea how it was going and at the very end I got to go into the last couple of minister just as he was warranty now and he came bounding up to me when it was finished he said he said you'll have to pardon my language but this is Russell Crowe speaking he said prices in brilliant yeah that was great and he was just all kind of pumped up and he was so impressed with these people and he said that at least three of them should know wrong you know just stop studying drama at Durham and should go on the stage right now and he went off happy as anything when we had a fantastic day was a great day man and you know all credit to him him it was almost a good thing that he did to come up here and spend a whole day here doing that but as far as I know he went away and thought that he'd been dealing with people who'd been studying drama for the last three years and I can tell you that no matter what else anybody does it nobody will ever impress me more than those guys did so that's the thing that really has always just knocked me out the most but there was a second thing which which genuinely impresses me all the time in it and that's just and I think it gets people tend to overlook it here particularly academics I think because because you know paused to this this environment all the time day after day after day and you just sort of take it for granted that this is the way the world is well in fact this is not the way the world is most of us don't live in this in this sort of very bubbling intellectual atmosphere and it is just the excitement that you find at a university in a place of higher education but I think particularly at a place like Durham where there's a lot of really high-quality world-class work going on and the thing that that in that regard that that impressed me the most in my time here was just across the road when I taken to the engineering department was one of the things I was trying to do during my time as Chancellor was visit all the departments I didn't succeed and do it better tried to visit the department's one by one in order just to get a sense of what they do and what and it's always tremendously exciting because you just meet these people and they're showing you what they're working on what they've been working on for years and what they're hoping to achieve and and just their enthusiasm is always very infectious and went to the engineering department they had just built an anechoic chamber and and it was which is just a soundproof chamber and I and I thankfully I thought before I went in there how interesting can that be and then they went in and saw it and I thought well not very it would say because it's it's just a soundproof chamber and I really just you know I just thought what is this and it was just it was like a radio broadcast booth with all this kind of foam baffles all over just obviously the whole idea was to to reduce sound to in it to an absolute minimum and I thought well how you know what's what's the story here I'm they started telling me about what they do in there and how by by having a completely soundless environment I mean it's a soundless is you can possibly make it as the equivalent of sonic vacuum they can manipulate sound waves to ever ever find a resolutions and just by it in this one little corner of Durham University they may be able to work out ways of through sound waves through very precise very measured sound waves they might be able to work out ways to identify tumors and in extremely early age when they're just a tiny dot so that you know at a stroke best cancer could be eliminated because because isn't giving you a chance to develop those because it's found I didn't at the stage when it's just tiny or through the same say means they they were spreading to the might be able to locate people who are safe hiking in the wilderness and fall down and maybe pass out or have a stroke or something if they're carrying a mobile phone what even if the mobile phone's not switched on somehow with these magic sound players to be able to locate people anywhere in the world as long as they're caring about which of course nearly everybody does these days or all kinds of other things like that might use it to find people that are behind walls or trapped in rubble during earthquakes and that sort of thing and it just struck me as I was seen it I thought they're so interesting so cool and it's so exciting and and you know if I hadn't been in brought here if I hadn't seen this you know I could just drive by on the road after that you never have any idea that and this one little corner to him this one thing was going on it so tremendously exciting and then you know you just look around and you realize like I said came out I saw other people the engineering department we're doing things with you know how to stop bridges from falling down before they should and other things like that and then you think every single department everywhere you look things like that are going on so that was that was the thing that I found really really endlessly tremendously rewarding about Durham all the time I was here and then the third thing that you do fantastically well and you can kind of take for granted when you're here for a while because because you just do it so routinely is raising money for good causes doing charitable things and doing it in a you know the most amazing and inventive ways people you know leaving here with no money in their pockets and then they not been Sydney six hours later or something to raise money for doc and it just is just again constantly bowled over by that I want to talk to you about something very specific to do with that in a minute but just to kind of break things up and lighten things up I thought it would introduce a reading here which is nothing at all to do with Dermott it's about another charity that's that's was at one time very close to my heart it still is really just a surprise yeah this is um an experience I had a few years ago now well I went to Kenya for Care International and the Care International is a wonderful charity does it does all kinds of heroic stuff in the in the third world helping people to help themselves as they always say and the my background to this is that I was just walking across Hyde Park and in London one day and personable young man came up to me and introduced himself he recognized me and told me that he worked for Karen and asked if I would be interested in supporting the work they do the charity in some way and I said absolutely especially if you let go of my ear and and I agreed to do it and anyway we met for a drink and decided that the they had this idea that I could go to one of their countries and visit several of their projects and perhaps write a series of articles for for a newspaper or something like that and that I would donate the money from the articles to care so it'd be a small fun fundraising exercise but most it would help to raise their profile as I was planning to do that and we decided can you be the place to go but then my publisher in London bless their hearts heard about this and they said no don't don't do it his newspaper articles will do it as a book and we'll sell it you know by the till at Christmastime and people can buy it and will donate all of all of everything except costs you know all of our profits will go we'll donate it to care and you can donate all your royalties and with any luck it'll make a reasonable amount of money and then my publishers in America heard about this and they decided to join in too so so really very very heroically they produced a little book which is this that came out some years ago and and the whole idea that was just to raise money for Karen it was just me described in his experiences I had visiting mrs. faith in thing visiting care projects in in Africa and it was just the most fantastic week I was going all over the place but there was one thing that I was really really dreading doing I really didn't want to have to do and that was it was the end of the week we had to go and visit a refugee camp huge refugee camp out in the northern deserts of Kenya at a place called to down and it's a it's Kara's biggest project in the whole world there's 134 thousand at that time there 134 thousand refugees from Somalia at this camp out in the desert living behind barbed wire I mentioned 134 thousand people in one encampment and these poor people were just stuck there they couldn't go back to Somalia because they were enemies of the state and it had been slaughtered but Kenya couldn't allow them to just it couldn't absorb them it had enough problems of its own without taking in a hundred and thirty four thousand additional indigenous people into the streets of Mombasa Nairobi and so on so while the world was twenty four able to do these people they were just stuck behind barbed wire and this most amazingly huge encampment so it was important to them that people should come and see them and I was really interested in doing so but the reason I was dreading going was because the only way to get there was in a light aircraft in a small airplane and I really really really hate little airplanes for reasons that I hope will become apparent in this passage I want to read you a few years ago I was on a scheduled flight on a sixteen Ceaser prop plane from Logan Airport in Austin to my local airport in New Hampshire where I was then living when the plane got lost in bad weather and couldn't find the airport for forty minutes we flew around in a curiously perplexed manner occasionally dropping through the low clouds which I couldn't help noticing we shared with many mountaintops before the pilot got his bearings or lucky and put us on the runway with a descent so steep that I sometimes still sit upright in bed at 3 a.m. thinking about it I vowed then that I would never ever go on another light aircraft then two years ago I flew in a light aircraft across Fiji almost but not quite ahead of the leading bounciest the leading edge of the biggest bounciest tropical storm I ever hoped to experience and I vowed then that really absolutely and under no circumstances would I ever again set foot on a light aircraft and now here I was about to fly 400 kilometers into bandit country in a charter plane in a third world nation I mentioned my reservations about this the next morning at breakfast to Nick's southern one of the care people who was looking after us oh I know just what you mean Nick said was feeling I'm petrified myself well Nick I said that's not quite what I was hoping to hear yeah absolutely bloody petrified he repeated for emphasis well dick I said I was rather counting on usually tell me that everything is going to be fine and that these planes never crash oh no they crash all the time Nick said I know they did the akai said I know but I was hoping that you would tell me that somehow in Kenya they don't and that for some reason that hadn't occurred to me the world's most outstanding pilots come here to do charter work Nick didn't seem to be listening to me at all any longer now crash all the time he said poor richard leakey lost both his legs in a plane crash in Canada now I'd heard that I said and he was one of the lucky ones Nick added enigmatic ly well about eight hours so after we had this conversation we were four of us three two of us from London and two from care in Kenya were standing at her little airstrip at a place called Malindi which is on the coast looking at the airplane that was going to fly us to to dab 400 kilometers across the desert and I'm so pleased to tell you that the plane looked sound looked okay I mean I'm obviously no judge of the air worthiness of a small airplane but it you know it seemed to be pretty well looked after it was either been recently repainted or was reasonably new but it was in good condition we walked around it we kind of touched the propeller and kick the tires and it all seemed very sound and best of all the the pilot there was this fantastic guy of absolutely it couldn't possibly work out his ethnicity a guy named Nino really wonderful guy was the pilot and he had on a smart uniform and he was clean and sober and he was he was you know one of those people that just has a very reassuring presence about him and he showed us that he didn't want to crash any more than we did to the he'd flown you know zillions of miles and he knew exactly what he was doing that we had not a thing in the world to worry about and shortly after that we take off on this flight to to d-dad and five minutes after we get into the air you know I just thought what an idiot I'd been to have been worrying about this because Here I am flying over the deserts of Africa how lucky am I how often do you get to do that in life to be taken in a little aircraft right across the deserts of Africa and it was a beautiful day it was absolutely glorious outside there wasn't a cloud in the sky or not a puff of turbulence anywhere it was just as smooth and clear say the flying conditions as you could possibly ask for and so I really enjoyed the flight and I just relaxed completely and I really felt like I'm just kicking myself for being such a fool and we landed it to dab smoothly landed on a dirt airstrip and everything was fine and let me excuse me and immediately we got there we were rushed off and taken off to this incredibly busy full intensive day that was was was wonderful but it was also just it was so hectic that it didn't have any time to reflect about anything and at the end of the day we got back to the light aircraft the weather conditions are still great and now all we have to do is get back on the plane and fly for another 90 minutes this time a slightly different direction we're going to Nairobi but but still just a 400 kilometer flight and in 90 minutes this whole nightmare experience that I've been so dreaded will be over with and we'll be we'll get there and we can go to check into a nice hotel and we'll be having our beers and a nice dinner and you know I have this great feeling of having accomplished this thing that I really had not wanted to have to get through so I was fairly really really happy we take off and again the flying conditions were absolutely perfect and it was just smooth and it was kind of the end of the day and the Sun was going down and it was just unbelievably beautiful and again I felt like the luckiest guy in the world until we got almost to Nairobi ten minutes before we arrived in Nairobi I found out why Nina had been a little coy when I'd asked him earlier on what the weather conditions were like ahead of us parked right over the city was a storm it looked enormous but the thing about sitting near the front and a small aircraft is that you can see everything to left to right and straight ahead none of it anywhere looked good we were over the outer suburbs of Nairobi and some some way into our descent before we hit any turbulence and it wasn't too bad at first it didn't feel as if the wings were going to fall off or anything but then the rain came suddenly and noisily in staccato fashion it was as if the windscreen were being pounded by wet bullets maybe it's always like that when in in the in the and you just don't know when you're in the separate compartment further back but this was most assuredly unnerving worse after a minute it became evident that Nina couldn't see a thing it began to move his head from spot to spot around the windscreen putting his nose right up to the glass looking for any tiny bit of disability and the impenetrable murk ahead I couldn't understand why he didn't put the windscreen wiper on then looked more closely and saw there wasn't a windscreen wiper and I glanced across at Nick and we shared a single telepathic thought there's no windscreen wiper actually two thoughts there's no windscreen wiper and we're all going to die Nina was now bobbing around in his seat in the manner of someone who's trying to land an airplane while while his trousers are on fire it appeared that from looking at the side windows he could get very rough fixes on our location but evidently only very rough because twice he banked extremely sharply as if swerving out of the path of a big oncoming building or something this was rapidly becoming worse than my worst nightmare but still he pressed on for one long minute nothing much happened at all we just flew forward in a seemingly straight line continuously descending when we were some small distance above the ground 70 or 80 feet say and there was still nothing to be seen in front of us I was pretty comfortably certain that we were going to die in the next few moments I remember being appalled about this peeved even but curiously nothing more than that and then bang and I used the word advisedly of course right before us rushing at us at a ridiculous accelerated speed was a runway Nina tilted the plane and dropped us with the sort of suddenness that made our hats rise off our heads we landed hard and decidedly off-center and for a long moment the one truly frightening moment of the whole episode it seemed that he wouldn't be able to keep control that we would hit the grass and somersault into a thousand pieces alongside the runway but somehow he managed to hold us steady and after a small eternity we came to a stop just outside a hangar I'm naming my first child Nino that Dan said quietly from the back Nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage he seemed to have pulled off the course of the landing Nina took off his headset and turned around be me sorry about that chats he said had a little trouble spotting the runway why is there no windscreen wiper I asked with difficulty oh they're no use with a single engine he said pointing to the propeller directly in front best wiper in the world couldn't keep up with the spray coming off that thing somehow this didn't seem an entirely satisfactory explanation but I was happy to leave it at that besides I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol and I can tell you this for certain now however many years have left to me on earth and wherever fate takes me the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me thank you thank you [Applause] yes there was a very roundabout way of introducing something when I talked to you about which is much closer to home and that's that's this wonderful thing called the love hearts appeal now as Chancellor I I got involved in various sort of worthy cause and causes in charitable things now I worked quite closely with with doc as a patron for several years and I always deeply impressed by how well and how wonderfully Durham students go out and raise money for worthy causes on one of the projects I got involved in for a while here was so was a it was called the my friend Ally campaign and it was all about trying to get students to sign on to the organ donor registry because young people are the ones that have the best organs and and young people are also the people who don't think they're ever going to die and so they tend not to sign on to the organ donor register and as a consequence a lot of people about 400 a year I think died in this country because there aren't enough organs donated so it's just idea was to try and raise awareness about that and I think a woman student here named Katherine McLaughlin I think heard about that or something similar and she approached me and got in touch with me and told me her story and Katherine story is really I'm tremendously moving and he said when she was 15 she studies Modern Languages here now but when she was 15 she had terrible sort of heart palpitations and and was taken into local hospital in Jersey where she lives and they immediately said you know you're a very sick young woman and they flew her to London and and she went straight into Great Ormond Street Hospital and the upshot of that is that after quite some harrowing experiences she was given a heart transplant and Katherine is here now and I saw her by here Katherine stand up in and I told her I'd be embarrassing her tonight but this is Katherine and Katherine went through I mean what you know what you go through to have a heart transplant particularly is a fifteen-year I mean just think back to what you were doing when you were 15 and how you know full of energy what you were and how full of life in hopes and plans and everything and and then to have that suddenly start and and to face the fact that you know you may not be surviving is just horrible for the person clearly it's horrible for the family it's just a horrible thing Katherine having been through all that having survived it and having had a heart transplant came on to Durham has performed brilliantly at Durham but in addition to all that and this is what goes backs what I've said about all the things you find time to do find time to pour here outside of academic time she started this campaign to raise money for the the cardiac intensive care unit at Great Ormond Street Hospital and approached me knowing of my interest in in this generally if if I would be patron and and the upshot is so they work with Katherine and her family to visit the the unit I create on the street a couple of years ago in a year or so ago and it was just I mean you you couldn't go there and not be absolutely moved it's the most fantastic thing and one no one hand is tremendously inspirational because because it really is one of the great hospitals in the world and you can sense that as soon as you go through the door you could see these people are really smart and really dedicated and they're doing great heroic work at the same time it's also it's also extremely antiquated facility so it's just the building itself is is this old Victorian building that really you know the sensible thing would be to just tear it down and make something five times this big they can't do that for various reasons and so they just have to try and Jimmy more stuff in and one of the things the catalyst to do is is put in more more beds more private space for four people at Great Ormond Street in the in the couple in the cardiac intensive care unit and it's just really heroic and and she's one of us she's at Durham so I was really very happy to get involved with that and just this room because we're entering the season of goodwill if you're willing they're interested or into any way you can become involved with this if you're saying your college representative abduct or anything like that I would just receipt you to to think about the love hearts appeal I think Kathryn did you bring some well you can see Kathryn here I have a word with her afterwards and if you would if you like or takeaway leaflet and read it but it's just it's completely turned this little worthwhile no I know you that you're asked to do a lot of things but but this because this is a Durham student I think it's it would be remiss of me not to put it in front of any of any Durham audience I speak to and I will continue to do that as long as keep inviting me back but so please um I just beg you to bear that in mind and having given you that commercial then we conclude with just another short reading and then and then I'll take questions I just come from Australia a country I absolutely adore and and this passage is a story that was told to me by a really good Australian friend so I can't claim any credit for this story but it's one that I forgot just always have loved and the person who told to me is a woman named Katherine Beach and she was my oldest friend in Austria I met her on my very first trip to Australia probably about 20 years ago now I went to the Melbourne writers festival and she just I was you know talking to a much smaller audience than this with a much smaller space than this and she was one of the people there and afterwards she came up and started chatting to me and we just hit it off and it was we formed a friendship and it was a kind of an unlikely friendship because Katherine was just about old enough to be my mother but we just really got along very well and she invited me out to her house in st. kilda and I met her family her kids who all about my age and I became a friend not just of Katherine's but of the whole family and it was really great because I didn't have any friends in Australia and here suddenly I was had this friendship so that's the background to this passage so we became great friends though it was a friendship based almost entirely on correspondence Catherine had never been to America and I went to Australia once a year if I was lucky in and then not always to Melbourne but three or four times a year she would send me long wonderfully discursive letters hammered out on a will on a jumpy and willful typewriter these letters seldom took less than an hour to read in a single page they could range over a galaxy of subjects her childhood in Adelaide the inadequacies of certain politicians why Australians lacked confidence while her children had been up to generally she's stuck in a wad of cuttings from the aged the Melbourne newspaper much of what I know about Australia I learned from her I loved those letters they came from so far away just getting an envelope from Australia still seemed to me a faintly wondrous event and described experiences that were unexceptional to her but breathtakingly exotic to me taking the tram into the city suffering through a heatwave at Christmastime attending a lecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute shopping for curtains at Davy Joe David Jones the big local department store I can't explain it except to say that without giving up any part of the life I had already I wanted intensely to have all that in my life as well so it was through her letters more than from almost anything else that I consolidated my fixation with Australia her letters were always happy but the last one I received from her was especially sunny she and John her husband were about to sell their house in st. kilda and moved to the Mornington Peninsula to take up a life of gracious retirement beside the sea just after she sent that letter to the shock of everyone who knew her Catherine suffered a sudden heart attack and died I'd had been on my way to visit her now instead all I can offer is my favourite at the many stories she told me in the 1950s a friend of Catherine's moved with her young family into a house next door to a vacant lot one day some builders arrived to put up the house on the vacant lot catherine's friend had a three year old daughter who naturally took an interest in all the sudden activity going on next door she hung around on the margins and eventually the builders adopted her as a kind of mascot they chatted to her and gave her little jobs to do and at the end of the week because with a little pay packet containing a shiny new half crown or something the little girl took this home to her mother who made all the appropriate cooing evaporation and suggested that they take it to the bank the next morning to deposit in the little girl's account when they went to the bank the cashier was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she come by her own pay packet I've been building a house this week she replied proudly goodness of the cashier and will you be building a house next week too I will if we ever get the bricks [Applause] and and on that note I will show the throw the floor open to questions if anyone has it just put a hand up or oh you get you're gonna go around with my professor okay if you have any questions otherwise I have to sing or something have you ever thought about writing a sequel to a short history new everything oh yeah well let me get this straight I wrote a book you wish to explain how to how the universe started and how it got to be the way it is today then what what's next yeah no I I mean I would love to go back and do more books like that and and I and I Stratos to do everything you know it's ten years old now and it will it needs updating I mean you know the hardest part for me writing that book was delivering it to the publisher and and because at that time you know I was I was really quite religiously reading nature and new scientists and publications icat and kind of following everything and and you know I'd continue getting nature and I'd read it and I see my god they found some you know a new shinbone in Ethiopia or something and you know there's some huge breakthrough in some other field and I was constantly trying to keep the book updated as it was going through the publishing process but of course print is you know it's frozen it's and it comes a point when the publisher tells you to stop you know we can't take any more the book is going away and and it's really hard it took me a long time I mean several months I was really frustrated because I just thought all this stuff was happening in science moves on you know continues and goes on and on so the upshot of that is that I had to just eventually stop them back off for them but of course after ten years it's just been so much so many developments in so many fields so in a sense if I I wouldn't write a sequel to it but but the book really needs updating and and I'm I'm thinking about that now it was just talking to my publisher about it a couple of days ago how how would we go about that because it's it would be a lot of work and I and I don't know that I could could face that you know because it's just so much work once you open that that door and all this stuff comes flying out and I find out sure how I would deal with it so I don't know what I'm going to do but I would like to bury this I would like to continue doing other books that are in similar kind of spirit I mean I would love to do a book frizzes on the human body and how or so just look at the body as a kind of machine and I I mean I thought I talked a lot about that in what history nearly everything but I was fascinated by the idea that you know we have these trillions of atoms and they don't stick together and they allow us to function and move about and and all these things inside you all these little systems are so meticulously perfect working to keep you going and been fascinated to look into that a little bit so that would be a kind of a sequel anyone else and just shout it out if you would whatever happens even cast so cats at the end of the summer he went home and he went back to Iowa and and I'm so pleased to taste it did it is doing it has done really really well and the cast was this was one of life's great failures and I didn't dwell on this much in the book because it would have been to too much of a downer really but but at the time we were doing the hike on the Appalachian Trail I mean he was in a really bad place he was struggling really hard to overcome alcoholism and I mean he was alcoholic like you wouldn't believe him and he was really had a problem I knew it and it was hard for him to give it up but but that made him quite grumpy and edgy and you know difficult to be around and I was the only person in the wilderness with him and but at the same time he was also getting over a relationship had failed and and he was just kind of feeling quite sorry for himself that is his life was messed up and he never had a proper job and he didn't have any career prospects and so he was quiet and gloomy and when I first did the first draft of the book I I kept all that in and I just thought this is just depressing it's not funny nobody's gonna want to read it so I kind of cheated it really when I when I then wrote the second after the book III kept in all his sort of anger and bitterness but instead of having it be about life in the world generally I made it more focused on the trail because he did really hate the trail and he was really angry with his equipment and so it's a truthful in the sense that the anger was all genuine but I just kind of redirected it and in the book or only told part of the story but in real life he was he was really hard-working very depressed and even we weren't having a great time so why didn't have very high hopes when when we start hiking and he went back to Des Moines my hometown settled down he met a new girl if there now man and wife he got a job he got a job working for a satellite printing plant at the wall street journal it was a good kind of well-paying steady job he stopped drinking he's had in the last 10 or 12 years he's had one little stumble where he went off a last weekend but otherwise he's been absolutely sober and conscientiously so ever says so he's doing really really well and I still keep in very close touch with him and we talk on the phone all the time it's a strangely when you go hiking like that you it's a kind of army buddy experience that you you really care about the other person in a kind of mating way you know and I so I really care that he's doing well in a way I wouldn't I mean I wouldn't be following him that intensive if we hadn't done the experience together and and he's so I'm just so pleased to tell you that he's doing really well and he when I tell him when I talk to I'll probably call him next Sunday when I was in term and somebody in the audience was asking but he's always thrilled he's just always really in German oh wow and and I always tell you I hope that's all right with you but I always had it was a really attractive woman it's a cheers about anyone else do you need assistance are doing the Dussehra something about your accent tells me I need to give a careful answer that no no I I loved it I mean I really did it was a strange thing I I came here you know in 1972 for the first time it was really the first time I'd been out of Iowa I'd ever you know grew up a thousand miles from the sea and as you know Iowa was a long way from anywhere and I got to Europe and I mean I didn't think of England is separate from Europe at that time to me that was just Europe everything everything job was just wonderful um but I found that when I got to England I really liked it from just from the moment I got off the ferry in Dover and it was slightly odd because you know it was not a particularly easy country that time in the early 70s a lot of industrial arrests here there was you know what's the country was not rich and comfortable in the way it is now and it was it was a lot harder work but I just really really liked it and and I came in I was just confused by everything but fascinated by by things I mean I genuinely had this experience I smoked at that time and I went in and I needed to buy some a pack of cigarettes and I didn't know how to do it and I mean I didn't know what to get in this you know there's hundreds of brands and somebody had to me asked for 20 number six and they gave him some cigarettes and I thought I actually thought that you don't ordered cigarettes by number and anyway so it was just but it's kind of fascinating working out all this this stuff how how the country worked and I just because you know because I could kind of understand it speaking English and and at the same time I was totally mystified saying and the other thing I really liked about the country was that it's and I still do appreciate this very much is that it's such a left handed country because I'm left-handed and everything here it says you know there's no country in the world that is kinder to left-handed people you drive on the left you you all kind of you know traffic things are built for the left is shift with your left hand my good hand I can shift with and all that kind and and the best thing of all was when I saw people eating I just wanted to fall to my knees and break into tears because you know as you've seen Americans eat you know when they cut up their food and make change the knife and fork around and my I was the despair of my mother because there's a left-handed person I don't do that I have fork in my left hand all the time knife in my right hand I cut and put straight my mom and to my mother it was always don't put it fork down and put you know put the food in your mouth or through my thing cuz that's the American Way and I just didn't do it and I come to a country and everybody is easy like I do and I thought I want to be here this is gay so I I just liked it and then while I was in the I stunned stumbled into a job at a psychiatric hospital just outside London and there I met my wife who was a student nurse not an inmate the student there's and and I met this girl and fell for her and so that's that's the story I mean I met an English girl and after we got married we decided that we would like to live here better and I still feel that way we have their back in the States at various times largely for the sake of the children I think I always felt really lucky to have got to live in two different countries anybody who gets to do that I think is very fortunate and we wanted to give our children some of that so we went back and lived in America for a while but this is Tamizh is it is home I feel really comfortable here and I never think about that I shouldn't be here unless you know it comes up in a conversation or something I mean this just it feels to me completely natural to be here now I've been here so long I feel totally normal well where are you from are you and how did you end up here okay yes so what do you what you working at there's a lot of there's a lot of Americas here we're slowly taking over done anywhere else I'm sorry and I'll get to you next but don't be so pushy oh one message yesterday that's a really good I'll come back to that because actually no I actually had an perhaps I'll close with that in in how we for time well because I'll come back to that's very end I haven't forgotten you and now you sir yes it's awkward I mean it's really hard and not just with my sort of immediate and my wife and children but just family and you wider sense I to do the kind of books I do which of our personal as you say and are very much based on my own life and actual experiences you know you need you know family to be very good natured and very willing you can um you know you can't give your mother a pseudonym and hope that little fool people so she has to be you know is complicit in this exercise my mom is always really was a very very good sport and I've made a lot of jokes about her because for instance my mom was the world's worst cook I really was is still the world's worst cook the the joke in our house when I was growing up was we didn't call it the kitchen we called it the burns unit and I so I made jokes like that in all of my books and she used to always get that was the only thing that upset her and no no you know I not really she wasn't really angry but she would just say to me I wasn't you know that bad a cook and and actually she was worse than I made her a better but I've been very lucky that might you know my my wife is really good natured it has put up with a lot and my mother has and and various other you know siblings and members of the family and people that I've been close to so that's you know I've been really really lucky because it's that's can be a very very delicate area and the one place where I have I have gone really carefully is with kids because you know you didn't want I don't want to write something a book that my children will be teased mercilessly about in school and of course a certain ages that's likely to happen so one of the things I mean I did a book about living when we moved back to America about readjusting to life in America and it was all very personal it's about our house and our life and and just you know our experiences as a family and and I didn't really want to bring my own kids into it so we sort of invented a compound compound child I called him little Jimmy and and it was it was really just you know the child in our household it was basically my son Sam but it wasn't identified him as as Sam and it was just a kind of eight year old kid who who because I needed a young child to be there watching me you know get lost and do things wrong and get furious and embarrassing ways and sorry I just sort of you know grafted him in but that's that's the only thing you can do but I've really been lucky with people being so good nature books generally did you say yeah well it's just it's for me it's really quite straightforward process and because books is something I stumbled into I mean I was mr. I was just a journalist and I was you know I wasn't even a writer as a journalist I was a sub-editor and I was on the production side of newspapers and I had a really good career of doing that I mean I enjoyed it I found it very satisfying to be working in newspapers and I was you know I was doing quite well I had a good job on Fleet Street and and I found it very rewarding but as my as I was started to accumulate children and had a small you know growing family I needed extra income as you do when you've got a young family and so then I started writing in my spare time mostly just travel articles for American newspapers and things like that small articles just to generate a bit of extra income a little by little I realized I was very rewarding I enjoy doing that and and so I started writing more and more and eventually reached the point where I didn't want to commute into London anymore but really wanted to try to make a living as a writer so we sold out and moved to a house in New York Street dales and then I had to make a living as a writer I mean we really were committed and and that is you know wonderful traits the mind terrifically because because you know you've got bills coming in and and no income coming in unless you generate it so that's what I started doing and I just wrote lots and lots of articles but then as a way of sort of diversifying I started writing books so for me it was never a process I reflected upon much it was simply a way of making a living and and it's always been that to me in in a way but I mean I don't mean to disparage it but but that's you know that's basically why I do it and that's what I'm really trying to do is just make a living and I've been really lucky that the books have done well enough that I've been able to go off in in different directions and not have to just keep writing the same kind of book over and over again because that is the curse of most writers is that you write a book and it does well and any publishers really want you to just keep writing the same book over and over again forever which is you know why you get a year in Provence and then toujours Provence and encore toujours Provence I don't know but you know this just they go on and on forever and you probably should put a lot of pressure you should do it so I was lucky to be able to get a break away from it but to me it's a job and it's a really pleasurable job and I love doing it and I really this isn't a single part of it that I don't enjoy but it's it's the job and I have bills to pay still so you know that's that's what I do my only trick is until sobriety successfully is is I never get distracted in the morning I never allow myself I would never go out to the green house to see how the cuttings are doing or anything like that I I get up in the morning and I have I get quite early to have a cup of coffee with my wife and we just sort of discussed the day and what what what we're going to do and and then with my second cup of coffee I go straight to my desk and I make myself start working right away and it's the most amazing thing cuz even after all these years it's still there's a horrible feeling of dread when you turn on the computer it's just a blank screen and you've got to fill it with words and you know this experience you've all had you know exactly what it's like when you have to do a term paper or something like that when you've got some bit of variety to do it's just an awful feeling and I still feel it you know after all these years but but it's also the most amazing thing is I start working and within 10 or 15 or 20 minutes it's all I want to do and no I don't want to break off and this it becomes pleasurable and and I cut to the same experience every single day you know I think I would kind of wise up to it but it's that every day it's like a new discovery oh god I don't want to do this oh hey this is kind of fun so that's that's it that's my writing career in a nutshell so read the back that I you know I I have been asked that question so many times but never so artfully that was really I couldn't possibly decide this I love every College equally so and that's the honest truth no I couldn't I couldn't possibly say no you and them do well what's in my books is my favorite well the answer I always give us the next one but that's really tough because I mean they're all so different it's a little bit like the same which of your children is your favorite you know you were very fond at them all not necessarily all at the same time but yeah very fond of them all at but I think probably the book is you know there's been the best for me but it's done the most for me and is a short history of nearly everything it's the one that sold the best all over the world and has you know got me sort of into nice places and being you know won awards and things like that says and it's the one I I really really enjoyed doing my publishers absolutely didn't want me to do it the same reason I was just touching on earlier about doing the same book over and over again and it was such a departure and they allowed me to do it they really can't even indulge me and that was just something that they were going to let me do just to get it out of my system because I wanted to do this book and and they they you know they allowed me to do it I had kind of earned the right to do a customer books have been I'd been successful but they really thought that I'd do this book and then I go back to just you know traveling around the world and getting drunk and falling over writing amusing accounts of myself being the fool and and I'd wanted to do this other thing and and they really didn't have any high hopes for it I didn't expect anything and it just it did really well it really kind of touched a chord with a lot of people and so that allowed me to branch out into other ways and do other things the book I would love to do and and I still can't get anybody to give me permission to do it is I'd love to do a book on Canada and and and as soon as you say to any publisher anywhere in the english-speaking world want to do a book on Canada all the all the blood drains from their face they begged you not to do it because nobody in the world wants to read a book on Canada nobody Canadians won't read books on Canada and and I find fascinating just for that reason you know that but I especially find Canada a fascinating place think it's a wonderful country it's a logical place for me to go for another travel book and so I'm hoping to do that but but really the publishers don't want you to do that we run an app tester just maybe one or more yes so somewhere in the world that I've never been for that I mean there's a lot of places it's because all the places i've got i mean i've got i've been lucky I've got to go to a lot of different places but they've all been pretty much been because you know somebody's given me an assignment together I mean the decision has been made some remote place and they've sent me so I've ended up going to lots and lots of places I never dreamed I'd ever get to go but but but but I'm sorry you know it's been a long time since I've really been able to kind of go voluntarily except for when I'm doing a book on it and doing a book on something it's quite different from wanting to go there because you know what what you need to get for a book is it's not necessarily what you need to get in order to have him was really happy wonderful experience but the I suppose the one country that I would really like to go to haven't got to and I must get to his India I have some friends who a good friend of mine his wife spent a lot of her childhood years in India and they go all the time and they love it and and you know they would take me I mean they would I could go with them and have a wonderful experience so I must do that I'm the only person in America that I would really like to go up and over Venice Alaska because I think it fascinates me and again it's kind of up there with Canada and part of the world that fascinates me maybe just one more question and I'll get back to the question I promise or not that's a really tough one what's yours in ineffable right I like I don't know I'd have to think that's really that's really an interesting question I'm sorry that I couldn't give you an intelligent answer particulars the last this is the one you're gonna leave tonight thank you you said earlier about some advice and I actually this was sort of compressed list advice you know when I had to burn a Vietcong creation speeches I had to give advice said that was that's what's expected of you as Chancellor and so I did a lot of advice giving and kind of working on and refining it over the years and and so this is this is sort of I came up with what as really my seven best tips for people to have a good life and it just seemed an appropriate thing to finish with so these are this is more that's what I've been telling students for all these years but I'll tell you because I don't get to tell you at congregations anymore seven things very simple one be happy really happy more or less all the time you you really ought to be you have a million things to be happy about you've been impeccably educated you live in a rich country at a times peace Mitt Romney is not going to be the president [Applause] so count your blessings a big vat of them too and if you can't be happy at least don't whinge it's awful and it doesn't become you indeed it doesn't get you anywhere no one will ever thank you or admire you more deeply or say oh let's invite Simon and Emma to the party they're fantastic whingers so stop now it's a waste of oxygen 3 when you're walking down the street and you see someone drop litter kill them 4 but otherwise be good in fact be more than good be compassionate be kind and particularly be kinds of people who are worse off than you which you will find is most people and say thank you a lot to everyone who deserves it 5 never never sneak up on people from behind and startle them in the belief that it is amusing it's not 6 always buy my books in hardback as soon as they come out and seven and if you remember nothing else from this evening remember this when called upon to speak in public always keep their remarks brief thank you all very very much it's been wonderful to be back [Applause]

Channel: DurhamUniversity

Views: 62,655

Rating: 4.781321 out of 5

Keywords: Bil, Bryson, Lecture, HD, Universities, UK, Durham, Charity, Kenya, Russell Crowe

Id: KK_jAMmEw5c

Length: 61min 52sec (3712 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 29 2012