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International Towel Day

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Last week, in memory of Douglas Adams and his world-famous book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (one of my all-time favourites), people all over the globe carried with them ‘the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have’ – in other words, a towel.

Perhaps more useful in outer space than on the Victoria line, who knows? Among Douglas’s famous followers are the wonderful Stephen Fry and author Neil Gaiman, who helped spread the word through Twitter. Even NASA and CERN (home to the Large Hadron Collider) are Hitchhiker fans – the CERN bulletin acknowledged International Towel Day and last year one of NASA’s spacecraft tweeted in the words of the existential sperm whale from book one: ‘And what’s this thing coming towards me very fast? So big and flat and round…it needs a big wide sounding name like “Ow”, “Ownge”, “Round”, “Ground”! … That’s it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it’ll be friends with me?’ before crashing into the moon. How many books can claim to have that sort of influence?!

I love hearing about events like this, where other people on the street will be asking themselves what on earth is going on. Unfortunately I never seem to be ‘in the know’ until after the event, when I read about it in the papers along with everyone else – but now I know about it, I’ll mark 25th May on my calendar for next year!

Louise Watson, Editor

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