Towel Day
So, I’m sat at my desk in my insanely hot office. Ambient noise is the sound of keyboards and mice tapping and clicking away merrily like a small flock of decidedly plastic songbirds. The occasional cough punctuates the atmosphere as we all sweat away our day in the inhumane heat.
So why do I have a towel draped over my shoulder?
DONT PANIC. Today is World Towel day. Every 25th May since 2001 Douglas Adams fans have proffered this tribute as a ‘thanks for all the fish’ to the almighty creator of Hitchiker’s guide, who dies back on May 11th 2001.
“A towel, it says, 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 vapors; 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); 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 hitch hiker 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.”
So, now you know. And if you don’t get a towel right this second I’m afraid you and I are over.
Back to sweltering work, I think.
