Translate into French: There was no bench or shelter by the bus-stop, nowhere to get out of the rain, If you travel much by public transport in Britain these days you soon come to feel like a member of some unwanted sub-class, like the handicapped or unemployed, and that everyone essentially wishes you would just go away. I felt a bit like that now - and I am rich and healthy and immensely good- looking. It is remarkable to me how these matters have become so thoroughly inverted in the past twenty years. There used to be a kind of unspoken nobility about living in Britain. Just by existing, by going to work and paying your taxes, catching the occasional bus and being a generally decent if unexceptional soul, you felt as if you were contributing in some small way to the maintenance of @ noble enterprise - a generally compassionate and well-meaning society with health care for all, decent public transport, intelligent television, universal social welfare and all the rest of it. I don’t know about you but I always felt rather proud to be part of that, particularly as you didn’t actually have to do anything to feel as if you were a small contributory part. But now, no matter what you do, you end up stung with guilt. Go for a ramble in the country and you are reminded that you are inexorably adding to the congestion in the national parks and footpath erosion on fragile hills. ‘Try to take a sleeper to Fort William or a bus from Llandudno to Blaenau on a Sunday and you begin to feel shifty and aberrant because you know that these services require vast and costly subsidization. Go for a drive in your car, look for work, seek a place to live, and all you are doing is taking up valuable space and time. And as for needing health care - well, how thoughtless and selfish can you possibly be? Bill Bryson