KEY POINTS:
Book tours tend to end in New Zealand, the end of the earth, and by the time he gets here Bill Bryson is shagged.
This tour, promoting a childhood memoir called The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, started in September. And Bryson, with his generous, old-fashioned
courtliness, refuses to cut corners. His Herald-Dymocks speech at the Hyatt keeps his 550-strong audience laughing for an hour. The book signing stretches until 2.45pm. After this interview he and 22-year-old daughter Catherine will just have time for a club sandwich before setting off for Rosmini College in Takapuna and hundreds more expectant fans.
One of the interesting things about Bryson is his flat American-English accent and curiously formal, carefully enunciated language - which makes the mildly dirty jokes and sneaky asides more of a surprise.
"What would you like to be remembered for a hundred years from now?" asks a woman. His smile crinkles under the beard. "I'd like them to say, the amazing thing is, he's still sexually active!"
The semi-private face is more thoughtful, much more tired. Up close, Bryson, 55, is a tall, gentle, bear of a man - and a tiny bit vain. He looks pleased when complimented on his navy corduroy jacket. He likes soft fabrics. "You know what I miss," he muses. "Velour. It was so comfortable." The idea of getting hold of one of those beige velour tracksuits worn by pop stars perks him up enormously.
Half an hour into the interview when we've found a better spot in the lobby, he allows himself to relax a little. Catherine, who has been marathon training in the Domain, is due down soon. "Bill Bryson sinks back into the armchair looking impossibly handsome," quips Brysonwith the humour he has worked on all his life.
His father, a top sports writer who made it into the Best Sports Stories in America collection for eight or nine years, was, he says, "the funniest man who ever lived".
His mother, an editor on the same Des Moines Register, had a habit of incinerating food, and presided over "the burns unit".
Their four children carried on the journalistic tradition.
His teachers were nicknamed things like Little Fat Squat One and Mrs Impossibly Large Bosom (the head).
Then, when he was about 7, Billy (a name he outlawed as soon as he was old enough) discovered a green jersey with a yellow flash of lightening appliqued on the front - and transformed himself into the Thunderbolt Kid.
It was the stage when every child likes to think he/she was adopted, though in Bryson's case it is hard to imagine why. There are no signs of parental neglect, no stories about vicious arguments and thrashings that many children endured in the 50s.
Instead the Brysons played around with words and jokes. Billy read comics and pretended he was too sick for school. His mother took him to dinner and a movie on Friday nights. No matter that the movies were boring as hell - Billy amused himself by crawling through the row of cubicles of the men's washroom, carefully locking each door as he went.
His father, who was legendarily mean with money, took him to baseball matches he was covering all over America. Getting a laugh out of his Dad was one of the most satisfying things in the world, says Bryson, and even though he can't remember one of those early efforts right now, he learned the art well.
Which could seem unusual for an American - especially a man born in Iowa. Not so, says Bryson. "The culture in Iowa in the 50s was funny."
Later, when he went to Britain, he discovered whole new types of humour, all based on the same self-deprecating style he'd grown up with. "That sort of humour seems to have vanished from America," he says. "Possibly because people are too busy. They don't have downtime, don't know how to relax and enjoy themselves."
How does he remember, in such detail, things that happened up to 50 years ago? Like most of us, he is not quite sure. The book is not a precise study of his childhood: "It's about being a kid," he says.
Possibly after the fracas over his second book, The Lost Continent, which mused about the women of Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, who seemed to be programmed to turn from delectable, lithe beauties into fat, waddling mommas in the space of a few years, Bryson is careful not to identify his victims. Back then he was banned from the mall. Probably still is.
Now, he is less critical of American fatties and the butts of his jokes are compilations of several people. Some are safely dead.
Like his parents, Bryson has had a happy, long-lasting marriage. He met Cynthia, who was working as a psychiatric nurse in Britain, when they were both in their 20s and, as he says, "we were very happy and we still are". After 28 years they have four children, two boys and two girls.
The thing that's different is that Cynthia has always been a full-time homemaker, much of the time acting as "Dad and Mom" to the children. She is also a very good cook: "I'm happy to say that on the record."
Not that his own mother's habit of cooking food still in its packaging ("I grew up thinking cling film was a sort of glaze") has dented his affection for her. Mary McGuire Bryson, former homecoming queen, is now 93, much loved and sadly too frail to travel to England "all the time" as she used to. Bryson tries to get over to Des Moines to visit twice a year.
Like most journalists-turned-writers, Bryson is prolific. He left his last job, deputy business news editor at the Independent, in 1987 for a freelance career. After a couple of tough years he hasn't looked back. His first book, The Palace Under the Alps (1985), has been followed by 13 more.
By far his most profitable book, which sold 60,000 in New Zealand alone, is A Short History of Nearly Everything. "In a way it's a curse to know too much," says Bryson of the book he took four years to research and write. He describes the finished product as a series of newspaper articles explaining, in the simplest-possible terms, the great scientific truths of our time.
Bryson's favourite of his own books is A Walk in the Woods, which describes a tramp through the Appalachian Trail with his childhood "friend" Stephen Katz (not his real name). As Bryson says, the challenge was to get 100,000 words out of something so darned repetitive, which is probably why he tried so hard and achieved so much.
He puts his success down to a love of reading and writing and a family in which journalism was what you did.
His own children got an extra 20 minutes of lights-on to read in bed - "anything they chose - a nice way to end their day" - which, presumably, made them lifelong readers.
Bryson has been to New Zealand half a dozen times, once as a guest lecturer on the QEII. Whenever possible he carries on the family tradition by bringing his wife or one of his children along for the ride. And yes, his publishers pay, except when the family takes a side trip, as they will this time with a week in Queenstown.
Unlike the Thunderbolt Kid who stayed up until midnight or later, Bryson's wife has "habituated" him to being an early riser. Now he writes from 5am, finishes around lunchtime and still has time to loiter in the afternoons.
"We go to bed early, don't drink too much," he says with a scantily disguised fondness for racier days when he did succumb to that "last, very large" glass of wine.
Why does he do it when he plainly doesn't need the money? Although he won't talk numbers, Bryson acknowledges he doesn't need to work this hard any more. He gave away his last two cash prizes, the Aventis to the Great Ormond Hospital for Children and the Heinz prize to help cystic fibrosis sufferers.
"I'm trying to slow down," he says.
But although he refuses the journalism assignments, other things race to fill the void. And so many interruptions, such as his chancellorship of Durham University and a meeting with Tony Blair, "are a pleasure and so agreeable".
But, in a life that sounds like a golden dream, Bryson has one thing he'd give almost anything to do one last time.
As he writes in the Thunderbolt Kid, "I'd give anything - really almost anything at all - to pass just once more through that gate [at the Des Moines Register] and see the guys in the sports department and beyond my dear old mom at her desk typing away.
"She was always so surprised - and so pleased to see me."
