Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.
To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.
The lesson to draw from this, of course, is that when you move from one country to another you have to accept that there are some things that are better and some things worse, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I don’t know whether I’m misanthropic. It seems to me I’m constantly disappointed. I’m very easily disappointed. Disappointed in the things that people do; disappointed in the things that people construct. I want things to be better all the time.
I know that communism never worked and I would have disliked living under it myself but none the less it seems that there was a kind of sadness in the thought that the only economic system that appeared to work was one based on self interest and greed.
Everything that has ever lived, plant or animal, dates its beginning from the same primordial twitch. At some point in an unimaginably distant past, some little bag of chemicals fidgeted to life. It absorbed some nutrients, gently pulsed, had a brief existence.
The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence.
Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.
Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about.
All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.
