Sunday, May 25, 2008

Towel Day

Happy (or do you say "Hoopy"?) Towel Day

Towel Day - Don't Panic

Update: Sorry to be maudlin, but this seems to be as good a time as any to share something I learned recently about the day Douglas Adams died...

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans will recall that Douglas attributed to the humble towel a miraculous potential for reassurance and utility. ‘There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is,’* the Narrator observes with admiration. The role of the towel traces its lineage back to the summer of 1978 when Douglas and various pals were on holiday in Corfu. Douglas was supposed to be writing, but a certain amount of hedonism and frolicking on the beach also featured.

Douglas’s towel – he needed one the size of a marquee’s groundsheet – was forever going missing. Perhaps it had some homing instinct for the sea, like a baby turtle. Finding it became synonymous with being a really together, cool kind of guy.

You may be touched to learn that, feeling faint from the rigours of the machine, Douglas picked up his towel from Peter and clutched it to him before lying down on a bench. In these circumstances specialists advise that becoming horizontal may not be expedient, but the piercing clarity of retrospect takes no account of the reality of an enormous, sweaty man, probably feeling a little woozy, poised to topple like an
uprooted tree.

He lay down. Peter glanced away for a second. When he looked back he thought that Douglas was messing about. Still holding on to his towel, he had rolled quietly off the bench. He had fainted. Peter called an ambulance, which efficiently speeded Douglas off to hospital. He never regained consciousness.
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