'I will never master this country’ and I was right.

From The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain by Bill Bryson. Page 115.

Now it can’t be argued that being a downtable sub-editor on the Bournemouth Evening Echo was the most stressful and high-powered job in journalism in the 1970s, but it was stressful enough for me. The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa. Employing me was an act of kindness. I had only the barest working knowledge of British spelling, punctuation, grammar and idiom, and almost no acquaintance at all with vast areas of British history, politics and culture.

I remember one day I was given a Press Association story to edit that I couldn’t follow at all – or actually could only partly follow, which made it even more confusing. The story was clearly about declining stocks of seafood off the west coast of Cornwall, or something like that – it was all about bivalves and molluscs, I remember – but scattered through it were frequent unrelated references to a certain well-known northern railway station. I didn’t know if this was a mistake or just the Press Association being eccentric in some way that I didn’t yet understand. I had no idea what to do, so I just read the story over and over. For two or three paragraphs the text would make sense and then suddenly there would be a mysterious, seemingly nonsensical reference to this railway station.

As I sat there, helpless with uncertainty, a copy boy came past and dropped a slip of paper on my desk, and all suddenly became clear. The slip of paper was a correction, and it said: ‘In Cornish fisheries story, for “Crewe Station” please read “crustacean”.’

And I thought then, ‘I will never master this country’ and I was right. I never have. Luckily for me, the people I worked with were kind and patient and looked after me.