Douglas

It is sad to note that today is the tenth anniversary of the death of Douglas Adams.

In two weeks it will be marked, as it is every year, by Towel Day. Towel Day follows two weeks after Adams’ death simply because the first one was observed just two weeks after he died, and the date stuck.

On Towel Day, people are encouraged to bring their towels with them due to their fundamental usefulness as noted in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

I try to observe Towel Day every year (I am, on the whole, largely unsuccessful on that front). Partly because Douglas Adams is my favourite author and the Hitchhiker’s Guide my favourite book, but also because I am constantly inspired by the Guide and Adams’ writing style.

I have also before now decreed Douglas Adams’ passing as a pivotal point in my life. This is in part because I am often quite aware of the chain of cause and effect in my life.

The chain in this instance runs thus:

Douglas Adams died in May 2001. At the time I had no experience of Douglas Adams or the Hitchhiker’s Guide. A few months later, the BBC reran the TV series, which I caught by accident one evening, and was instantly hooked. I bought the book a few days later, and found it a massive inspiration which got me back into writing, leading me ultimately to study creative writing at university – where I met my wife (although obviously she wasn’t my wife at the time, would have been weird). And from there springs everything else.

Anyway, I guess what I’m trying to say is, we miss you Douglas, and I always find it so sad that it took your death for me to find you.