The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page A

bless their sweet, undersupervised little hearts—but I am pleased to say that this was the only place along the entire walk that I encountered litter.

    After the summit at Beachy Head, there comes a broad, parklike expanse of land with a selection of paths plunging downhill to the old resort town of Eastbourne. The views over the town’s sweeping seafront with its golden beach and scallops of advancing waves are very fine, too, though marred by a single high-rise apartment house called South Cliff Tower, which stands distractingly in the foreground. It’s a charmless building that should never have been allowed, but there you are. The world is full of shitty things that should never have happened. Look at Sean Hannity.
    In nearly all other respects, however, Eastbourne is a good place. The promenade is well kept, with big houses and smart hotels on one side and broad beaches on the other—all leading to a good old-fashioned pier, one of the few truly classic piers still standing. Just after my visit, the pier was badly damaged in a fire—seaside piers in England seem to be amazingly combustible; I don’t know why—but according to press reports it will be lovingly restored. I most emphatically hope so. It would be a tragedy to see it go.
    The charm of Eastbourne is that it is so comfortably old-fashioned, and nowhere is that better encapsulated than in a café where I always stop called Favo’loso. It is the most wonderful establishment. It is like stepping into a 1950s movie called Summer Milkshake or Ice Cream Holiday or something. Favo’loso is spotless and polished and shiny; it basks in a retro gleam. The food is decent, the servers efficient and friendly, the prices reasonable. What more could you ask? It is my favorite place in East Sussex, if not on the entire south coast. Two days before I left on this trip, I googled “Favo’loso Cafe” to check the address and was led, all but inevitably, to TripAdvisor, where I was appalled to discover that most people didn’t view it very favorably at all. One recent visitor pronounced himself “Dissapointted” with the experience. Well, here is a new rule: If you are too stupid to spell “disappointed” even approximately correctly, you are not allowed to take part in public discourse at any level.

    Trawling through the reviews, I found that hardly anybody spoke warmly of Favo’loso’s carefully preserved atmosphere. In fact, most were critical of the decor, calling it old-fashioned and in need of an update. I do despair. We live in a world that has practically no appreciation for quality, tradition, or classiness, and in which people who can’t spell even common words get to decide what survives. That can’t be right, surely. I was, as a TripAdvisor correspondent might put it, deply trubbled.

Chapter 3
    Dover

    N OW HERE IS A question that is harder to answer than you might think: Is Britain a big country or a little one?
    Looked at one way, it is self-evidently small, a modest chunk of land floating in chilly waters off the northwestern edge of Europe. Of the total surface area of Earth, Great Britain occupies just 0.0174069 percent. (I should note that I can’t absolutely vouch for that number. It was calculated for me by my son some years ago for a newspaper article I was writing. He was only about thirteen years old at the time, but he had a calculator with over 200 buttons on it and he seemed to know what he was doing.)
    By other measures, however, Britain is incontestably substantial. Amazingly, it is the thirteenth-largest land mass on the planet and that includes four continents—Australia, Antarctica, America, and Eurasia-Africa (which geographers, being anally retentive and unimaginative, classify as a single mass). Only eight islands on Earth are bigger: Greenland, New Guinea, Borneo, Madagascar, Baffin, Sumatra, Honshu, and Victoria. By population, Britain is the fourth largest island state, behind only Indonesia, Japan, and the