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The Long Bright Teatime of the Soul

You don’t really take a full and considered look at how someone has affected your life until they’re dead… which is a shame, because at that point an inflated ego is no longer really possible. It’s almost like being told what a great kid you are and how wonderful your homework is by your parents while you’re asleep. You go about your existence and never know, really, how much people feel about you… and you may never know.

I (and in saying I, I mean we really, myself and my wife) never met Douglas, never prodded him with daft questions on a TV phone-in, never sent letters or posted comment at his site Forum (and actually get a reply). For a moment, a while back, I felt I had something of a bone to pick with him about what was happening with h2g2… but in the end I had more contentions with the BBC than Douglas and his stalwart supporters. I would have liked to have met him… but the time has past and that will simply have to go down on the list of things I have to do when I transcend to the next level… whatever that might be.

Of course, what I would have said to him is another matter altogether. I find that, right up until the last moment, I rarely know what I’m going to say to any celebrity. I know they are ordinary people, but I have the same problem with ordinary ordinary people too.

Influences on Travel and Towels

I would be lying if I didn’t say that Douglas’s writing hadn’t influence my own, along with Pratchett, Python, Sellers and others. I have never resorted to footnotes in writing outside of reviews… but I aspire to do so. I have read virtually everything Douglas published, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide more so than any of the others. I have come to respect my towels as being something more than an absorbant fabric rectangle in the bathroom. When I get lost out driving, something that happens a lot, I owe the Holistic Driving technique to Douglas and his wonderful Dirk Gently novels. I got to my wedding using the Holistic method, following someone else until I ended up in a place that looked familiar enough for me to strike out on my own.

I may be tempted to take some form of pilgramage. Lying in a corn field staring up at the stars, probably blasted on alcohol to the edge of consciousness, seems like something worth doing, even if it hadn’t been the sort of situation Douglas was in when he first envisaged the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Sitting in a hotel corridor watching the lifts rise and fall also seems like the sort of one-off event that a life would be incomplete without. I would like to complete a novel, after the forty-second attempt, and see it going to print… then worrying my agent into a nervous breakdown with every sequel that followed.

To live for just a moment like Douglas…

Time Well Spent

I have had a lot of time for Douglas and I invested a lot of time in his creations, from reading books to listening to the radio plays, from hundreds of posts at the Starship Titanic Employee Forum to many reviews at the H2G2 site. Douglas parting this world is a terrible loss, for his wife, his daughter, his family, his friends, his associates and his fans. Our wait for his next book may be longer than we had anticipated…

However, he will always be with me, always waiting their behind my shoulder (with the rest of them) readying a new footnote or an appropriate quip. His influence has been enough to make a difference. Hitch-Hiker has been with me since school. I recall getting very upset about not getting to see an early eighties run of the Hitch-Hiker’s TV series on the BBC because my parents had this odd idea about appropriate hours for waking and sleeping. I still have my original copy of the first book, the pages going a parchment brown colour, musty and worn with age and careful reading. DON’T PANIC lurks in lurid pink on the back cover.

Tap, tap, tap, Ook!

…but somewhere, in an infinitely large space, on an infinite number of word processors, there are an infinite number of monkeys typing the sixth book of the Hitch-Hiker trilogy.

Afterword

Writing on 14th June 2001, a little over a month after Douglas’s death, it is still clear how painful this loss has been to many people. At the official Douglas Adams site there have been more than 10,000 messages posted in tribute, kind words and well considered thoughts. There are mutterings of a book being published with Douglas’s unpublished works – e-mails, essays, the script of the Hitch-Hiker film and an unfinished novel called “The Salmon of Doubt” – but somehow I feel this is terribly wrong as if this material was worth publishing Douglas would have done just that. He had high standards (frustratingly high) and a staggering case of writer’s block, but he wasn’t adverse to get his face in the media and a book would have done just that. I think that whatever remains unseen is best left that way.

It is also painful to note that the proposed Hitch-Hiker film, the rights for which lie in the hands of Disney, has struck the rocks of Production Hell. Without the driving force of Douglas and knowing the vague disinterest of Hollywood execs I do not hold out much hope that the film will finally make it to the screens – and if it does, I fear that it will not be the movie that all the fans have been waiting for. Only time will tell.