Bill Bryson: I'll cheer for England, but I won't risk citizenship test

Bill Bryson is "too cowardly" to take the UK citizenship test, but will be supporting England when they play the USA in the World Cup next week.

The Norfolk-based American author further risked incurring the wrath of his home nation by revealing to the Hay Festival today that he broke and discarded an award given to him by his home town in the States.

Bryson was granted the freedom of Des Moines, Iowa, – the city where he grew up in the 1950s and which he immortalised in The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid – and was given a huge polystyrene key as an award.

After lugging this cumbersome honour around America, he was relieved to discover it had snapped in two on the flight home, giving him the excuse to leave it on the plane.

Bryson, who writes about the rectory in rural Norfolk that he has made his home in his new book, At Home: A Short History of Private Life, told the audience at Hay that he had been resident in Britain long enough to acquire citizenship and wanted to do so, but was scared of the newspaper headlines if he failed the notoriously difficult test. "I'm too cowardly to take the test," he admitted.

A member of the audience later put to him a potential question from the test about which two numbers he could call for an ambulance if he became embroiled in a fight in the pub. "I would call my wife," Bryson quipped.

But Bryson passed the football test when asked whom he would be supporting when England play the US in their opening World Cup match, declaring that he would happily cheer for England. "I just hope you're good at taking penalties this time," he said.

Since first arriving in a country he described as "a socialist paradise" as a backpacker in 1973, Bryson has watched how Britain has become more affluent, despite current economic woes – and more American.

Compared with the 1970s, observed Bryson, Britain has become individually far wealthier and yet collectively much poorer. "We act all the time now as if we're really poor and yet we're really rich," he said. "It makes it much more like America, which is about individual wealth and collective poverty."

Bryson gave the example of current debates about the need for affordable housing, which seemed plentiful when he arrived in the 70s. "It was called council housing," he said.

He also lamented the "self-absorption" of modern Britain and the sense that "everybody is in a hurry and rules apply to others, not to me".

"I've never seen queuing like in Britain in the 1970s," he said, although he acknowledged that "queuing etiquette" had not completely broken down compared with other nations, such as Italy.

Interrogated by an American member of the audience after he had said that the problem with US elections was that there was always a presidential candidate who was "terrifying", Bryson conceded that he still enjoyed America's superior climate and cheeseburgers.

"The great thing about coming from America is that anything good about America goes out to the wider world," he said. If he craves a good American cheeseburger, he said, he can always find one in Britain. "And that is why I'm happy here."