English by Ben Fogle - An Immensely Readable Account of the Celebration of Englishness

I've followed Ben Fogle from Taransay in Castaway 2000, to the South Pole; and then all round the world with New Lives in the Wild, so I was intrigued to receive English - A Story of Marmite, Queuing and Weather for Christmas to discover the essence of being English and how it should be celebrated.

You would think that Ben Fogle was the quintessential Englishman, often mistaken for Prince William, but he isn't: his father is Canadian and his grandfather Scottish, but he was born in London, and describes himself as

     

'...a Land Rover-driving, Labrador-owning, Marmite-eating, tea-drinking, wax-jacketed, Queen-loving Englishman.'

So who could be better for the task?

Ben Fogle's style is rather like Bill Bryson's (if you loved Notes from a Small Island, you'll love this), but with fewer facts and figures and rather more action! He takes us through everything that makes the English English from the weather to the perfect cup of tea in an immensely readable account whilst he chases a 9lb Double Gloucester cheese down Cooper's Hill; joins the Royal Household Calvary on their summer holiday at Holkham beach in Norfolk; presents the weather forecast and has a go at tasting Marmite at the factory in Burton on Trent.

I loved this book, and I'm sure that anybody who has an interest in celebrating Englishness would love it too. 

Discover Many Interesting Facts About Shakespeare with Bill Bryson

This is an immensely readable account of the life of William Shakespeare, as you would expect from such a conveyor of interesting facts as Bill Bryson.
However, even he hasn't got a lot to go on!
The blurb from the back of my 2007 edition quotes Bryson and says:
'On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was.'
Also, there are also only three possible likenesses of the great man, all made after his death!
Nevertheless, the book, at just short of two hundred pages, takes us through Shakespeare's life, illuminating it from what can be gleaned from the social history of the period.
Bill Bryson pieces together what the original Globe theatre must have looked like, and what life was like for the actors and indeed the people of London where theatres were shut for months on end because of continual outbreaks of the plague.
He also attempts to discover something about Shakespeare's relationship to his wife, Anne Hathaway, to whom he famously left his second-best bed!

Anne Hathaway's Cottage

 And, of course, Bryson examines his plays, discussing in which order they were written, and whom, if anyone, he collaborated with, and whether the glover's son from Stratford-upon-Avon even wrote them at all.
I don't think that Shakespeare scholars would find much that they didn't already know, but for the average person, keen to find out a little more about the Bard in an interesting and amusing way, it is well worth reading it, especially now, in 2016, we are celebrating four hundred years since his death.
However, for those whose interest is sparked, there is a good biography at the end for further reading.

You can buy Shakespeare by Bill Bryson here.

Follow The Road to Little Dribbling with Bill Bryson and Bill Turnbull!

Over the years, I've enjoyed Bill Bryson's books set in Britain, America and Australia, so I was excited to see this new one: The Road to Little Dribbling. Its subtitle is More Notes From A Small Island, referring to the book he wrote twenty years ago about a trip around the country that he's adopted as his own.
He starts off writing in his distinctive style about how he got hit on the head by a parking barrier in Deauville, France, and in the days that followed as he got over it, started to wonder which English town was on the other side of the channel; it was Bognor Regis. This led him to decide to travel 'The Bryson Line' from Bognor to Cape Wrath to see what had changed since his trip in the 1990s.
The Bryson Line is merely a guide as he wanders from east to west, visiting places that take his fancy, all the way giving us many pieces of interesting information. For example, did you know that England has five different kinds of counties, or that Bryson lived next door to Ringo Starr for six months without even knowing it? But, I think, as he travels about the country, he gets more frustrated with the way things are going downhill, especially as he was President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England from 2007 to 2012, and at the beginning of the book, is about to take the test to become a British citizen!

One weird thing happened on the morning of the 24th February. I'd just been reading about Bill Bryson's visit to Kinder Scout in the Lake District, the scene of The Mass Trespass in 1932 in which workers from Manchester and Sheffield walked over the moors in defiance of the Duke of Devonshire who had closed the land to them for his grouse shooting, and which led to the first National Park, when I turned on BBC Breakfast to find another famous Bill: Bill Turnbull, actually in the Peak District, talking about The Mass Trespass itself. I couldn't believe it!
The Road to Little Dribbling is an entertaining read, packed full of information, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
Which is your favourite Bill Bryson book?