Travel with your towel
by Mike K-H
This started off as a travel-related blog, so let’s get back to travel. Galaxy travel.
On 15 May 2001, Douglas Adams died of a heart attack. He was only 49 years old, but he left an indelible mark on the world. The genes he left behind will probably be diluted beyond recognition within a few generations - but is quite likely that his memes will still be flourishing.
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy earned him bewildering fame, and is the source of the idea of celebrating today, 25 May, as Towel Day in his memory:
A towel 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.
Clearly, people enjoyed working with Douglas (well, perhaps Hollywood found him impatient - he referred to his Hollywood experience as being like trying to grill a steak by inviting people into a room one at a time to exhale their warm breath over it). Take a look at The Journal of Peta from the BBC.
The Swedes, creators of the rebellious Bit Torrent site Pirate Bay, loved him. A Swedish bookshop in Malmö is selling ‘Don’t Panic’ towels.
The WikiMedia Commons photo at the head of this post shows the Austrian city of Innsbruck, which Adams claimed gave him the inspiration for the Hitch Hiker’s Guide. Meanwhile, on flickr.com, you can browse both banal and creative images from all over the world. My favourite is this one.
No tribute that I can pay would compete with the Guardian’s obituary article.
