Relative distance

I have begun reading Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island: An Affectionate Portrait of Britain. Lee introduced me to Bryson's books and I highly recommend them to you as well.

This particular volume was written about a trip the author took through Britain after living there for twenty years and before returning to his homeland of the United States to settle in New Hampshire.  He begins by talking about "certain idiosyncratic notions that you quietly come to accept when you live for a long time in Britain. [One] is the idea that Britain is a big place."

Go check your globe and you will see that, at least by American standards, this is hardly the case. But he illustrates it by telling how people react to a suggestion that one is going to make a short trip. Immediately to the folks sitting around the pub overhearing your plans, it takes on the dimensions of a lengthy and difficult expedition.

"Oh, those funny Brits!" you may be tempted to smile to yourself.

But it is not only they. [Yes, I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you.]

When my parents visited me in Boston in the 1990s, we paid a call on the Discalced Carmelite nuns in Barrington, Rhode Island where I had lived as resident chaplain for a year when I was on sabbatical and attending Brown University. In the rambling conversation, I mentioned some things that had changed in town during the three or four years since I had been there. One was that the large supermarket had closed.

The nuns became very lively and pointed out that they now were forced to drive into the neighboring town of Warren to do their grocery shopping. After several minutes spent bemoaning this great inconvenience, one of the younger nuns quietly spoke up and explained to my parents, "You should know that it is all of three miles."

It did not strike my Texan parents that three miles was much of a distance. But to the Rhode Islanders, apparently it was. Rhode Island is 48 miles from top to bottom and 37 miles from side to side. Texas, on the other hand, is 790 miles from top to bottom and 773 miles from side to side. Great Britain, by the way, is about the size of Kansas or about half the size of California. The illustration at the top shows the size relative to Texas.