Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Page B

mind fogged with Townswomen's Guild and Women's Institute reports, and say, 'What?'
'You have heard of the nua-nua bird, I take it?'
'Er, no.'
He would cock an eye. 'Really? How extraordinary.' And then he'd suck his pipe.
It was altogether a strange place. The editor was a recluse who had his meals brought to his chamber by his secretary and seldom ventured out. I only saw him twice in all the time I was there, once when he interviewed me, a meeting that lasted three minutes and seemed to cause him considerable discomfort, and once when he opened the door that connected his room to ours, an event so unusual that we all looked up. Even the old boy paused in his endless shuffle to the window. The editor stared at us in a kind of frozen astonishment, clearly dumbfounded to find a roomful of sub-editors on the other side of one of his office doors, looked for a moment as if he might speak, then wordlessly retreated, shutting the door behind him. It was the last I ever saw of him. Six weeks later, I took a job in London.
Something else that had changed in Bournemouth was that all the little coffee bars had gone. There used to be one every three or four doors, with their gasping espresso machines and sticky tables. I don't know where holidaymakers go for coffee nowadays - yes I do: the Costa del Sol - but I had to walk nearly all the way to the Triangle, a distant point where local buses go to rest between engagements, before I was able to have a modest and refreshing cup.
Afterwards, fancying a bit of an outing, I caught a bus to Christchurch with a view to walking back. I got a seat at the top front of a yellow double-decker. There is something awfully exhilarating about riding on the top of a double-decker. You can see into upstairs windows and peer down on the tops of people's heads at bus-stops (and when they come up the stairs a moment later you can look at them with a knowing look that says: 'I've just seen the top of your head') and there's the frisson of excitement that comes with careering round a corner or roundabout on the brink of catastrophe. You get an entirely fresh perspective on the world. Towns generally look more handsome from the top deck of a bus, but nowhere more so than Bournemouth. At street level, it'sf
essentially like any other English town - lots of building society offices and chain stores, all with big plate-glass windows - but upstairs you suddenly realize that you are in one of Britain's great Victorian communities. Bournemouth didn't even exist before about 1850 - it was just a couple of farms between Christchurch and Poole - and then it positively boomed, throwing up piers and promenades and miles of ornate brick offices and plump, stately homes, most of them with elaborate corner towers and other busy embellishments that are generally now evident only to bus riders and window cleaners.
What a shame it is that so little of this Victorian glory actually reaches the ground. .But then, of course, if you took out all that plate glass and made the ground floors of the buildings look as if they belonged to the floors above, we might not be able to see right into every Sketchley's and Boots and Leeds Permanent Building Society and what a sad loss that would be. Imagine passing a Sketchley's and not being able to see racks of garments in plastic bags and an assortment of battered carpet shampooers and a lady at the counter idly cleaning her teeth with a paperclip, and think how dreary life would be. Why, it's unthinkable.
I rode the bus to the end of the line, the car park of a big new Sainsbury's at the New Forest end of Christchurch, and found my way through a network of pedestrian flyovers to the Highcliffe road. About a half-mile further on, down a little side-road, stood Highcliffe Castle, formerly the home of Gordon Selfridge, the department store magnate, and now a ruin.
Selfridge was an interesting fellow who provides a salutary moral lesson for us all. An American, he devoted his productive years