As today is National Towel Day, I’m hoping you both have your best Egyptian Cotton towels, either tucked into your trouser waistband or draped around your neck. Carry it with you all day… you never know when you might need it.
That wholly remarkable book, The HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy has this to say on the subject of towels:
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker 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 miniraft 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 avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a brush, 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 hitchhiker 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.
Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)
Anyway, can’t stop: there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside who want to talk to me about this script for Hamlet they’ve worked out.
Totally lost on me. Have never watched an episode. Maybe caught a few minutes of one years ago. Guess you could say I threw the towel in.
The TV series was good; the film was OK; the books were great, but the radio series was the best, in my opinion.
Either way, HHGTTG isn’t really your sense of humour, I would say.
I was late to the book(s) but early to the radio series. It was broadcast on BBC World Service and I listened avidly in the Trenches Of Near Death on my shortwaving radio device. It made me think of home and almost (but not quite) made me feel homesick. But as I was already sick of home that was a non sequitur. But I loved the radio series even on the crackly old radio. Particularly loved the bit where Ford says ‘Did you know your robot can play Pink Floyd?’ Lovely humour.
Can’t say I remember the Pink Floyd comment, but it would have been a bit of a waste… for something with a brain the size of a planet.