Neither Here Nor There by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

is a trifle hazy (I once asked her to book me a plane ticket to Brussels and she phoned back ten minutes later to say, ‘Would that be the Brussels in Belgium, Mr Bryson?’), had booked me into a hotel in the 742nd arrondissement, a charmless neighbourhood somewhere on the outskirts of Calais. The hotel was opposite a spanking new sports complex, which had been built to look vaguely like a hill: it had short-cropped grass growing up its sides. Quite what the idea of this was I couldn’t say, because the walls sloped so sharply that you couldn’t walk on the grass or sit on it, so it had no function. Its only real purpose was to enable the architect to say, ‘Look at this, everybody. I’ve designed a building with grass growing on it. Aren’t I something?’ This, as we shall see again, is the great failing of Paris architects.
    The hotel was one of those sterile, modern places that always put me in mind of a BUPA advertisement, but at least it didn’t have those curious timer switches that used to be a feature of hotel hallways in France. These were a revelation to me when I first arrived from America. All the light switches in the hallways were timed to switch off after ten or fifteen seconds, presumably as an economy measure. This wasn’t so bad if your room was next to the elevator, but if it was very far down the hall, and hotel hallways in Paris tend to wander around like an old man with Alzheimer’s, you would generally proceed the last furlong in total blackness, feeling your way along the walls with flattened palms, and invariably colliding scrotally with the corner of a nineteenth-century oak table put there, evidently, for that purpose. Occasionally your groping fingers would alight on something soft and hairy, which you would recognize after a moment as another person, and if he spoke English you could exchange tips.
    You soon learned to have your key out and to sprint like billy-o for your room. But the trouble was that when eventually you re-emerged it was to total blackness once more and to a complete and – mark this – intentional absence of light switches, and there was nothing you could do but stumble straight-armed through the darkness, like Boris Karloff in The Mummy, and hope that you weren’t about to blunder into a stairwell. From this I learned one very important lesson: the French do not like us.
    That’s OK, because of course nobody likes them much either. It so happens I had just seen a survey in a British paper in which executives had been asked to list their most despised things in the whole universe and the three top ones were, in this order: garden gnomes, fuzzy dice hanging in car windows and the French. I just loved that. Of all the things to despise – pestilence, poverty, tyrannical governments, Michael Fish – they chose garden gnomes, fuzzy dice and the French. I think that’s splendid.
    On my first trip to Paris I kept wondering, Why does everyone hate me so much? Fresh off the train, I went to the tourist booth at the Gare du Nord, where a severe young woman in a blue uniform looked at me as if I were infectious. ‘What do you want?’ she said, or at least seemed to say.
    ‘I’d like a room, please,’ I replied, instantly meek.
    ‘Fill this out.’ She pushed a long form at me. ‘Not here. Over there.’ She indicated with a flick of her head a counter for filling out forms, then turned to the next person in line and said, ‘What do you want?’ I was amazed – I came from a place where everyone was friendly, where even funeral directors told you to have a nice day as you left to bury your grandmother – but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter.
    ‘No, no,’ you would say,