As one goes through life, one comes across many people to admire, to respect, to be grateful to, to idolise even. But it is a rarer thing to encounter (albeit across, say, a TV screen or the pages of a book) a person one would actually like to be. Two public figures (private figures are ruled out, one simply knows too much about them) fall into this category for me.
The first and original, is Sir David Attenborough. This is a person of profound learning and expertise in his chosen field, who clearly feels a deep passion for it, who has been lucky enough to be able to spend his life pursuing it interestingly all over the planet. Not only that, but he has brought pleasure and intelligent enlightenment to millions through his books and TV series, has been everywhere a human being could possibly want to go (others besides), has enjoyed adventures and unique experiences, and gives every impression, through it all, of thoroughly liking his life and being a pleasant, balanced human being into the bargain. Moreover, he has, at least so it seems, done good in the world and will leave it, as they say, a better place than he found it. (Note to readers: please don't debunk this myth, I don't want to know.)
The second person in the category, on an admittedly more modest scale, is Bill Bryson. In this case, it's not a question of extraordinary experience (though he has done a large number of things I would dearly love to do - and, crucially, could do), but of attitude. This is a man of great learning lightly worn, a man who can find fascination and amusement in almost anything, however small, and a man with a terrific gift: the capacity to communicate his pleasure and interest in almost anything he encounters in a witty and highly readable way. Along the way, he gives every impression of being a thoroughly likeable human being, comfortable in enjoyment of his life.
All this to say that the latest Bill Bryson book, "At Home" once again reinforces this impression of a man patently enjoying what he does, although there are unusual hints of, well, not quite anger, but at least serious concern, over a public issue at the end of the book, where he raises questions of global warming and the atrociously unequal resource consumption in the world. But that is a coda to a book which is typical of what one might term the later Bryson, no longer laugh-out-loud travel books, but witty "everyman" explorations of science, history, language and so on.
His conceit is to take his own house, an old Norfolk rectory, and look into the historical developments which can be associated with its various rooms. The hall gets him thinking about Dark Age communal living, the bathroom about pestilence and the London sewer system, the dining room about food and famine, and so on. The connections can be tenuous, but that is, as ever, the joy of the roving Bryson mind, which strays off down amusing, remarkable, occasionally horrifying, byways in a manner which is always enlightening and entertaining.
I'm sure that some-one, somewhere, feels both snobbish and aggrieved by the Bryson phenomenon. A serious historian may root in the archives for years to establish the truth about past events, a scientist may dedicate his life to identifying a sub-atomic particle which changes our understanding of the universe, but it is Bryson who sells shedloads of books with his amiable ambles over this territory, sometimes even freely admitting he doesn't quite "get it" (e.g. chapter on nuclear physics in "A Short History of Nearly Everything").
I could actually understand that, but in the end, I'm firmly with Bryson: he's interested, he tells it well, he conveys enthusiasm and, to be fair, there's a hell of a lot of work behind these seemingly undemanding strolls in the fields of human knowledge.
Might even quite like to be able to do that myself.
Recommendation? Of course I liked it. I like this kind of thing. I'll happily accept that others might not. It's not a must-read, but if you're curious about, well, things, you'll like this book
An amiable ramble over world history prompted by a Norfolk rectory
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