Wish You Were Here Read Free Page B

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 himself 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.
    He had suffered a catastrophic cardiac arrest. Astonishingly—nearly instantaneously as it turned out, and mercifully without pain—his huge heart had failed him. Jane said he just stopped, like one of his beloved computers crashing and failing to reboot.
    He was dead.
    ••••••
    “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.” “But,” says Man, “the Babel Fish is a dead giveaway isn’t it? It proves you exist, and so therefore you don’t. QED.” “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore he proves that black is white and gets killed on the next zebra crossing.
    Most leading theologians claim this argument is a load of dingo’s kidneys, but that didn’t stop Oolon Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his bestselling book
Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.
    F IT THE F IRST,
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
    It may seem odd to start with an account of Douglas Adams’s world view, but it underpinned much of what he did. It is a key—not The Key, as such things do not exist outside self-help paperbacks—to how he thought.
    Douglas published his first piece of commercial writing when he was twelve. It was a fan letter to the
Eagle,
*  6 the smashing—and quite high-minded—boys’ comic. It was 1965, the year Churchill died and the Beatles released
Rubber Soul.
Wily Harold Wilson was Labour Prime Minister. The Vietnamese War had started in earnest with a massive build-up of American troops and the heavy bombing of North Vietnam. It would be six years before Intel developed the first silicon chip. Marijuana was still a gesture of defiance, not just a recreational option, and long hair on men was considered by some to be a dangerous threat to the fabric of society. It was the sixties: in the West a whole range of flukishly favourable circumstances conspired to produce massive social change and the most spoilt generation in the history of the world.
    Little of this upheaval reached Essex, however, where Douglas attended a school that was proud of having cherished the same values since 1558. His contribution to the boys’ comic earned him ten shillings. In those days, before the decimal digits had fingered the eccentric British currency, ten bob (as shillings were known) was 50p in today’s money. It was an amount large enough to have its own pretty brown note; with it you could buy twenty 6d (old pennies) chocolate bars. Douglas’s letter, characteristically playful, described a state of high anxiety, the source of which—after some sneaky authorial misdirection—turned out to be the arrival of the
Eagle
itself.
    Dan Dare was the
Eagle
’s most famous creation. An intrepid space pilot with a fine line in unflappability and cocked eyebrows, his origins lay in the fighter aces of the