Britons Well-Read, Even When Not Well-Fed

Bill Bryson writes in ‘Notes From A Small Island’ that the average person in Great Britain is very well-read. Visitors to London also notice that Londoners will board the tube and routinely pull out a book or atleast a newspaper. You could do a little naked jig in your coach for a full 30 seconds but people may not have noticed, absorbed as they are in ‘The Moonstone’ or ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ or whatever.

I thought of all this when my husband alerted me to a homeless person sitting on the pavement of the very posh King’s Road in Chelsea, totally engrossed in a book. My caption for the photograph below would be, "Britons well-read, even when not well-fed."