Towel Day – 25th May 2008

Today was towel day. A day dedicated to the late great Douglas Adams who was an absolute legend. I’m not going to write a biography here for the man – so if you don’t know exactly who he was or why I think he was a genius head on over to Wikipedia, they’ve got plenty to say about him.

I will however say this: the day I heard that Douglas Adams had passed away I cried. No, seriously. I would have loved to read many more of his books and there’s just no one who does it quite like he used to.

Towel Day finds it’s origins in The Hitch hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – because as anyone knows, the most important thing for any hitch hiker of the galaxy is that you should always know where your towel is.

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker 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 vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft 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 to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you – daft as a bush, but very, very ravenous); 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.”

R.I.P. Douglas Adams – so long and thanks for all the fish.