Notes from a Small Island 3 of 7

one of the things that has always struck me as said to British seemed to get a lot of pleasure out of little things I mean if they are the only people who can pack Tupperware and go yes and and have a real good time do it yeah and fold up rain hoods is that charming as it kind of sad I think we're a very limited nation I think pleasure was a way overstatement really I don't think the British people don't like to have pleasure really they'd like to pass the time and if they can find something that passes the time and doesn't involved in which physical effort British people like to sit down really don't when I went when I went to Weymouth and I've not been to seaside for ages I noticed there were all these shelters along the pond with people sitting in them there were tents on the beach with people sitting in them there were windbreaks people sitting behind them with cardigans on they were blue wool there were lots and lots of blue people and they were just sat sitting and that you could tell they weren't then I do anything they've got there and that was it and then at the end of the day say right we've sat here for eight hours and now we can go home we went in a cafe the other day and we ordered for jacket potatoes and she said I only got three this is a cafe why have you only got three potatoes I've got my potatoes in that in my house this is an odd thing we just don't have that you know the hospitality that warmth and that catering thing and one of these proposal good people I was with ordered a macaroni cheese it really like someone vomited into another presentation I don't know look at when I was seasick the next day I just threw that said sorry if you're gonna have all that in Britain where did you go oh good so I could walk so I like walking I don't mind my city yeah I've always tired upstream so you have the most beautiful countries in the world can people go and sit on very edge of it you call it a holiday but if people I mean wish people go for a picnic they don't go for a picnic by a extremely go by the side of the road and watch lorries go past then they sit by a pile of loose chippings I mean we used to go brought but we would always find a pile of news chippings near Munich or someone sit by that because we felt more comfortable why do you why do you think the British is you have this aversion to pleasure it is simply not in our nature I think it's not in our nature to be celebratory I think we're we're putting up with people that's why we were sent promised in the more as we had so many things to put up with put a little some countries with people like a little assorted or a cute somewhere in England I'm delighted to tell you there is a village called tit Z elsewhere you can find licky and blubber houses Priddle well nether wallop thornton la beans and a particular favorite of mine shallow bowels where I come from place names tend to be flat and uninspiring in Iowa most towns were named after either the first pioneer to arrive or the last Indian to leave Smithville Jonesboro Sioux City so there's a particular pleasure to me in the rich and satisfied lilt of English place names altogether there are some 30,000 place names in Britain and a good half of them I would guess are notable or arresting in some way some like Chu Magna or spittle in the street are just resplendently silly but many others by their very names summon forth images of lazy summer afternoons and butterflies darting in matter ups Winterbourne Abbas Western lulling fields fettle for All Saints Little Miss ndon I don't think it's exaggerating at all to say that a significant part of the satisfaction and appeal and even beauty of the British countryside lies in the place names just hear the words little rollright Wooten Fitz pain or Compton balance and you can visualize the old stone church the village green the duck pond like here in this quintessential slice of middle England I couldn't hear the conversations but I could imagine the drift no I always sit the flower sorry to hear about Giles his company I'm sure he'll be alright he was a partner wasn't he well I said London's only an hour away and I wouldn't move back Daphne gave me a tremendous recipe for tofu we've taken Fiona out of st. buttocks it just wasn't for her we've got the new Audi the turbo diesel version the dogs are Dorot it could be called upper income or twittering on the green in fact it's Milton Keynes yes as in Newtown only this part of it has been kicking around for 800 years since the 1960's the residents have had to cope with of an image problem but there is a positive side I own my job to the new city quite look at you live in the village I'm quite proud to live around the whole thing but we are quite protective about it still being Milton Keynes village because all the new houses that are going up now are going to be referred to as Middleton and they tried to change Milton Keynes village name to Middleton and we didn't like that because we are the original village and I don't think you can take that name away I mean we're very old yeah yeah we've got canals which go back to the seventeen and eighteen hundred the old coaching roads up through Stoney strap for the cock-and-bull stories and all that sort of thing yeah one of his fear only is a modern city in the middle of it but there's a lot of history around all around Milton Keynes the village lies Milton Keynes the new town where things could hardly be more different stare out the grey and empty it's a monument to the infinite possibilities of concrete the sort of place that might have looked good on paper but doesn't work in the real world actually I can't believe it ever look good on paper new Townsend button always feel as if they were designed by people who heard about America from the radio most towns exist because people need a place to get together Milton Keynes doesn't even seem to need people it's just a place of glass offices and ring roads you can walk for hours they are not see another pedestrian the buildings are of that featureless type that you have to walk around completely at least once before you can identify the entrance the streets are built on a characterless grid the bus stops are coldly alphabetical before long you cease to exist yourself or so at least it can feel the pedestrian walkways wander through a kind of subterranean netherworld so that you constantly have to climb steps to see where you are and where you are always is nowhere in particular Milton Keynes is a place designed by a committee maybe they should have left it to one man salt air in West Yorkshire is a model community that works and the reason I suspect is that it's the vision of a single person one Titus salt a textile magnate now a quiet suburb of Brantford salt air was built between 1851 and 1876 it's difficult to know what to make of old Titus on the one hand he was one of that unattractive breed of teetotaling self-righteous god-fearing industrialists in which the 19th century seemed to specialize a man who didn't want merely to employ his workers but to own them on the other hand he gave them living conditions which in industrial Victorian England must have made the town seemed a very Eden but there was a price salt air was a monument to his greatness and they were not allowed for a moment to forget it in search of details of this Victorian Valhalla I went into a bookshop that came out with the owner Clive would assault Devitt a so what sort of people moved to salt an well our own MP Chris Leslie he lives here and we've got our own member of the House of Lords houses for sale yes I still desire all this place isn't very much Sun salt never missed an opportunity to immortalize himself and his family even the streets in the village were named for his wife 11 children or other family members but his greatest or at least most particular monument to himself was his church what do you believe this is a nonconformist chuckling yeah it's unique it's a grade 1 listed building no expense was spared well Sultan's building the church Caroline his wife insisted that he put about to the uniform family he would never sit in it he always sat in his workforce and he was a bit of a childcare because to get back at the 1i he went out and bought two massive chandeliers and he situated in such a way that when she was up in the balcony she couldn't see what was going on in the church Titus a sense of humor extended to architectural detail like putting the head of Bacchus the god of wine on a building devoted to temperance his factory built in the shape of a tea for Titus and known as the Palace of Industry spread over nine acres at its peak 1200 looms produced over 17 miles of cloth a day Titus was Emperor of all he surveyed and when he died he had a funeral of almost imperial splendor 100,000 people lined the streets if we were to go back looking at from our modern perspective would we be appalled by the conditions or would we be oppressed I think you'd be impressed again the standard of housing provided is as good now as it was in its time people still want to live in the houses of Salta it's a very popular place to be but salt himself never lived in salt air though his son and successor Titus jr. did in 1870 he built a great mansion about a mile away at a place called Milner field at the time the family fortunes seemed boundless and perpetually secure but in 1893 the textile trade went into a sudden slump leaving the salts dangerously overexposed in short order they lost the house the mill the village and their money welcome to the Great Hall it's interesting to think that just a little over a century ago Titus salt jr. could have stood on this space and been in one of the grandest houses in the north of England and today it's essentially all gone all that remains of salt house now is this a few patches of tiles from the floor of the conservatory which once covered an area about the size of a tennis court run salts workers would have been among the first to take annual holidays helping in the process to establish resorts like Morcom which was then an exotic three-hour train journey away today it can take near for Morgans Golden Age was in the thirties and almost all that remains of it is the Midland Hotel it was the age of the luxury liner while on dry land hotels captured some of the Seabourn and romance with sweeping lines and deck light floor plans that were the hallmark of Art Deco how elegant it must have been to take tea while listening to a wonderful piano recital times have changed at the midland as indeed they have from morkul i asked for and got a room as far away from the lobby as possible it's difficult for today's visitor to comprehend but more calm was once the premier northern resort as late as the 1950s it posted 1,300 boarding houses and hotels some of them the equal of the finest in europe the midland stood at the top of the pile the midland itself like the town it lies in is an enigma Art Deco was made possible by the invention of concrete but the local builders couldn't cope with the stuff and built the hotel with good northern brick and then plastered it over and painted it I have to sleep here tonight it would be like sleeping in Barbara Cartland handbag they've spent 60 million pounds on improvements to Morcom in recent years seen today it's hard to believe that this was once a resort that outdid Blackpool it was the birthplace of bingo lettered Brock and the helter skelter it lent its name to half a comedy duo today it has some go-carts you could walk faster than a choice of stone benches a little chug chug train that goes from nowhere special to nowhere special a new promenade to keep the bay at bay and visitors so few in number that they are worth recording that's nice very nice it's hard to credit that once more come accommodated a hundred thousand people a day on the plus side I do have the beach all to myself the greatest surprise about Markham isn't that it's declined but they did ever prospered in the first place now at last its discovered that it's only possible future lies in not being Blackpool I just wonder if the place can hold out until that becomes common knowledge you can take away your peers and big dippers a seaside resort will always have something for me as long as there's a genuine Italian emigres ice cream parlor good enough to win a diploma of merit in the horizontal freezer section the brute Gianni's have been in the town for a century I first came to Morcom in the 1980s even then it was a resort that clearly had seen better days but they remained a certain charm you could see that it was never going to return to its former glory but that doesn't really matter there was a string of Lights that ran the whole length of the prom and when I was out when I for a walk the only person out on the front anywhere the wires above me began to crackle and hum and after about five minutes the lights very reluctantly came on and I realized that that was the Illuminations of Morcom it was kind of pathetic really but there was something rather sweet and endearing about it I liked it and now those lights are gone and I miss them your greatest export the thing you should be most proud of is the English language and if it were to have a head office why not in stratford-upon-avon it was George Bernard Shaw who said that the English and Americans are two people's divided by a common language sometimes it can divide even those of us who come from the same side of the ocean those let's move Delaware mesh olden number wasn't that way years ago they didn't have wireman I haven't the faintest idea what he was on about however it is true that more often than not the confusion exists between the two main english-speaking nations rather than within them altogether there are four thousand common words in English that are used differently on one side of the Atlantic Ocean from the other well to you this is a coach load of pensioners in trousers and trainers arriving in a car park and queuing up in a herb garden filled with basil and aubergines to us Yanks it's a busload of senior citizens arriving in a parking lot and pants and sneakers and standing in line in an herb garden filled with basil and eggplant and when I came here they somebody apologized or said that they were not queue-jumping and I never you never heard that never heard that until he was it here are menus that mystified you well prawns Hans yeah yes I had a prawn sandwich today and it was good but it was shrimp yeah there are those who find the infinite variety and elasticity of English a source of delight and there are those who do not I should have won it in two cents easy i Marley worried about that because easy isn't quite Michael Russell is a representative of the Queen's English society now that goes alongside the boy he done good on all these other awful abrasive things which Americans obviously had no knowledge of English language yeah well because the tennis player in a spontaneous moment in an interview failed to use an adverb correctly you know I think I deleted judgment about a whole nation absolutely I asked him to step outside to what extent would you hold us Americans accountable for decline in English it is a great mistake to think that American is English it's not it's American and it started out maybe 200 years ago as the kind of English that was spoken here but it's been exported it's been swelled around quite a bit and now a lot of it because of communication and travel is all washing back again and some of the things that are used by English people the media and so on are actually Americanisms we have had in the courts recently a number of cases where women have claimed that they have been subjected to demeaning practices in their place of work I'm sorry I've lost the stand here what does this have to do with linguistics well the media pick up on it you go on television and in the first week they were being accused of some kind of harassment and within three or four days to become harassment and there was nobody around to say excuse me gentlemen we're British would you mind actually say encouragement so everybody's got the same pronunciation and if you don't know how to spell it you'll find it in the dictionary between half-baked and hogwash but I still think that standard English itself ought to be that it ought to be sadly my problem with this sort of thinking isn't that I resent being told how to speak because I can decide that for myself my problem is that it was this sort of you must speak as I tell you attitude that drove all the other languages of Britain to the margins it was because children were forbidden to speak Welsh or a Gallic on the playgrounds that they've become so endangered English is a wonderful language however you pronounce Harris but it's not so special that it can't make room for other languages it's as well to remember that English is by no means the most venerable tongue on these islands had it not been for some German invaders who crossed the channel in the fifth century and Harris the hell out of the Celts we would all now be speaking something quite different on south uist in the Outer Hebrides Gallic is still a feature of everyday life but it faces an uphill battle against the irresistible lure of English I'm here to meet a man of words the eyelid barred but I'm being taken there by a man of letters Donald Steele what language did you grow up with Oh make sure a both really a mixture about so what made you switch over to English exclusively well like from like when the children were young I spoke Gallic to them when they were small babies when they were older and went to school English that was in school so we just spoke English to me so we just spoke English at home all the time have the kids you grew up with your mates uh-huh how many of them are still on the island not many they're nearly all away really yes majority of them it's probably just only a handful of left home is that because of work or because they wanted something more exciting ah you just wanted to go away and see what was all like enjoyed it probably stayed what brings you to the islands well I'm doing research at the moment for I'm preparing a PhD thesis on human migration on the Western Isles I've been a regular visitor on the island nineteen first time I kept coming back every year brother fell in love with the islands south and north uist mark the point where two peoples the Celts and Vikings met and decided to put down their battle axes and pick up umbrellas there was after all enough conflict and just dealing with the elements they kept themselves to themselves and as a consequence there's a severe shortage of surnames I don't think it was a lack of intelligence or imagination but Christian names also have the added joy of repetition so much so that it is hard not to find the Donald MacDonald in each of the MacDonald homesteads I was looking for Donald MacDonald the bard as opposed to Donald MacDonald the Shepherd Donald MacDonald the mechanic or Donald MacDonald the brother of Ronald McDonald it's easy to find his cottage you go to the edge of nowhere and then go a bit further

Channel: Rob Thomas

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Keywords: Notes From A Small Island (Book), Bill Bryson (Author)

Id: S91hmQXF_XI

Length: 22min 41sec (1361 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2015