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

Philippines. By wealth, it is second. Measured by decent music, old stony buildings, variety of boiled sweets, and reasons for not going to work because of the weather, it is number one by a very large margin. Yet it is only seven hundred miles from top to bottom and so slender in profile that no one in the country is ever more than seventy miles from one of its edges.

    Taken all in all, it has long seemed to me that Britain is just about the perfect size for a country—small enough to be cozy and embraceable, but large enough to maintain a lively and independent culture. If the rest of the world vanished tomorrow and all that was left was the United Kingdom, there would still be good books and theater and standup comedy and universities and competent surgeons and so on. (Plus England would get to win the World Cup every time and Scotland would always qualify.) This cannot be said of many other nations. If Canada were the only country to survive, the world would be a nicer, politer place, but there would be way too much ice hockey. If it were Switzerland you would have glorious scenery, precision watches, reliable trains, and, well, that’s it.
    Interestingly, the thing that made me realize that Britain is an optimal size was the rarely discussed subject of cow attacks. This is a topic that we don’t pay as much attention to as perhaps we ought. I first heard about cow attacks some years ago while walking on the South Downs Way with a reporter from a walking magazine. I had just become president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, a venerable conservation organization, and he was interviewing me about the countryside. At some point—we were crossing a field in the vicinity of the Devil’s Dyke, near Brighton, if I recall correctly—he mentioned that we should proceed cautiously because there was a bull in our field.
    “You’re kidding,” I squeaked, but sure enough, watching us lugubriously from about fifty feet away, was a great rectangular block of beef.
    “Just walk normally,” my companion instructed in a taut whisper, “or you’ll attract his attention.”
    “But we’re on a national footpath,” I protested, my sense of unfairness momentarily outweighing my instinct to flee. “Surely a farmer can’t put a bull in a field with a footpath through it,” I added. I turned to see what my companion had to say about this and discovered that he was now about seventy yards ahead of me and running like hell. I waddled briskly behind him, casting whimpering glances over my shoulder, but the bull stayed rooted to his spot.

    When we were both safely on the other side of the field wall, I repeated my complaint that surely it was not legal to put bulls in fields with public trails through them.
    “Actually it is,” my companion told me. “The rule is that bulls can be placed in fields with footpaths as long as they are with beef cows and not dairy cows.”
    I was of course bewildered by this. “Why one and not the other?” I asked.
    “No idea. But the real danger,” he went on, “is cows. Cows kill a lot more people than bulls.”
    Whatever is the next level beyond pained incredulity is the level I reached now. For years I had been striding boldly through herds of cows in the belief that they were the one group of animals larger than a chicken that I could intimidate with the shake of a stick, and now this was being taken away from me.
    “You’re kidding,” I said again.
    “Afraid not,” he responded in the solemn tone of someone with experience in the matter. “Cows attack a lot .”
    The next day I did the one thing you should obviously never do. I looked for more information on the Internet. My informant was right. Walkers in Britain, it seems, are killed by cows all the time. Four people were fatally trampled in one eight-week period in 2009 alone. One of these unfortunates was a veterinarian out walking her dogs on the Pennine Way, another long-distance trail, in Yorkshire. This was a woman