"I wandered back into town the way I had come and, for want of anything better to do, had another pottering look in the shop windows. And then, outside a greengrocer's, it happened- something that sooner or later always happens to me on a long trip away from home. It is a moment I dread.
I started asking myself unanswerable questions.
Prolonged solitary travel, you see, affects people in different ways. It is an unnatural business to find yourself in a strange place with an underutilized brain and no particular reason for being there, and eventually it makes you go a little crazy. I've seen it in others often. Some solitary travelers start talking to themselves: little silently murmured conversations that they think no one else notices. Some desperately seek the company of strangers, striking up small talk at shop counters and hotel reception desks and then lingering awkwardly after it has become clear that the conversation has finished. Some become ravenous, obsessive sightseers, tramping from sight to sight with a guidebook in a lonely quest to see everything. Me, I get a sort of interrogative diarrhea. I ask private questions for which I cannot supply an answer. And so as I stood by a greengrocer's in Thurso, looking at its darkened interior with pursed lips and a more or less empty head, from out of nowhere I thought, Why do they call it a grapefruit? and I knew that the process had started.
It's not a bad question, as these thing go. I don't know about you, but if someone presented me with an unfamiliar fruit that was yellow, was the size of a cannonball, and tasted sour I don't believe I would think, Well you know, it rather puts me in mind of a grape."
Bill Bryson, Notes From a Small Island.
This is the fourth book of Bryson's that I've read, but definitely not the last. He's good. He's also versatile; the other books that I've read are: A Walk in the Woods, A Short History of Nearly Everything and Shakespeare; The World as Stage
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