My favourite book was orignally a radio series, then a book, which became a TV show, and then a website and finally a towel. It was written by a man who gave every indication of not wanting to be a writer, who would have been very much happier if people had paid him to mess around with technology and then enthuse about it over various forms of media. It is inextricably linked with a number for no very good reason.

I’m talking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Little known fact: before wikipedia, Douglas Adams put together a very early online community called The Digital Village. Part of that project was the Earth edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The idea was that researchers could submit factual articles about almost anything, written in the Guide style. Here’s a quote from the entry on the town of Reading (pronounced “Reding”, US Chumrades):

“In fact the proposal could have been ‘secession from the United Kingdom, annexing the Sudetenland and a fourth Thames bridge’ and it would still have been just as strongly supported – everybody in Reading agrees upon the need for another bridge.”

As soon as I found out about this, I signed up. Not for a Fouth Thames Bridge, but to be a researcher. I was brimming over with bad ideas for Guide entries, which I never got around to writing.

Eventually, the Guide moved to the BBC website, and here I not only wrote a couple of entries but became a volunteer sub-editor too. Why? Because I wanted to be a part of the book, and the culture that had grown up around it. In short, I wanted to be a frood who knew where his towel was.

There is a progression of humour in Britain that starts at the end of the Second World War. Servicemen who had discovered a talent for entertainment entered civilian life and tried to get jobs in showbusiness. Some of them were successful. One of them was Spike Milligan. His work, notably a radio series called The Goon Show, did things that previous generations would have considered absurd. Milligan inspired others, notably the members of what would become Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The Pythons, in their turn, helped foster other talent. One of those talents was Douglas Adams. I was also raised on The Goon Show and found a similar streak of absurdist, surrealist and satirical humour in the works of Douglas Adams. I read the books – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. I did more than that, I memorised large chunks of them. Adams had a talent for creating scenes that are easily memorised. They have a cadence and rythm to them, like lyrics, and often surprisingly apt. If you’re not careful any appropriate situation will summon a line from one of the books.

This, then, was a sense of humour that I understood. Not just understood, could participate in. Douglas Adams seemed to be a writer that got me. This is, of course, nonsense. He was no such thing. But when you’re a bookish teenager with more brains than sense, a writer who seems to be a vast intelligence in search of a home appeals directly to that sense of awkwardness and placelessness that some of us feel. My later discovery that Adams wanted nothing more than to be left alone to evangelise about Apple computers, networking and the internet merely served to solidify him in my mind as Someone To Listen To (and possible wean off Apple products).

Tragically, Douglas Adams died far too young and certainly before he’d really seen some of his throwaway ideas become fascinatingly real.. On my departure from America, I sat in LAX with an early model Kindle. I had my life in two checked bags and all my documents, and a towel, in a small satchel by my side. I had no home, no job and no certain future. On a whim I turned on the Kindle’s whispernet connection and went to the Guide website. I read the entry on Leicester, my intended destination. So there I was, a wanderer looking up travel information on an electronic book. I’d arrived in my own future.

The Brew:

It’s tempting to quote the recipe for a Pan Galactic Gargleblaster from the book, but let’s be real. You can’t follow the recipe so you can’t drink the drink.

Luckily, early on in the book Ford Prefect prepares Arthur Dent to travel by matter transference beam. He advises muscle relaxant, and protein. Or six pints of bitter and a packet of peanuts, all of which are readily available in any pub. That just leaves the question of which bitter you should drink. I thought back to what I would have got hold of at the time and arrived at the distressing recollection that it would have been Greene King IPA, which I didn’t like. I supposed Ruddles County would have done at a push, but six pints of the alternative (Abbot Ale) would have had you on the floor and unconscious instead of simply relaxed.

Greene King is the brewery, so any locally brewed IPA will do nicely, and if you happen to be an American any craft brewed IPA with a good hoppy quality to it should do the job nicely. Unlike Arthur Dent, who had about thirty minutes in which to neck his beer before the world ended, you’ll have the luxury of sipping a decent beer while you start on Arthur’s journey.

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Born in England, David Webb tried to identify his ancestral roots by having his DNA tested. The lab results came back accompanied by a note reading simply “oh dear.”

He lives somewhere in the middle of England, where his tendency for sarcasm and his crippling addiction to tea pass without comment by the general population. He likes reading and writing, history, science fiction and things that are silly, neatly combining all of these by venerating (as all Brits surely do) Doctor Who.

He recently acquired a Bowler hat and is not afraid to wear it in public. You can find more of his writing here.