To all those united in lockdown
I write this on yet another glorious warm sunny day, it seems that Mondays and Tuesdays are the good weather days. This week it is more important than ever to have golden sunshine as we are celebrating! I am writing this on Tuesday the 26th, it is 26 degrees outside and it is my mother’s “26th” birthday! I have not been entrusted with baking the birthday treats but my sister has a rack of white-chocolate eclairs drying in the kitchen and we will be celebrating with moules in a homemade creamy garlic marinade this evening. We did also order some extra special treats, such as escargot, only to find out that the next delivery spot was Thursday, so the birthday celebrations will have to continue until then.
The partying, however, did not start today; in fact we had an event of similar magnitude to celebrate yesterday. ‘Towel Day’ is on the 25th of May and celebrates all things involving Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy, and this one, 42 years after the original series was broadcast, makes this Towel Day even more……. sorry, not Towel Day, I meant my brother’s first wedding anniversary which, by a stroke of luck, coincides with my sister-in-law’s first anniversary as well as Towel day. We made sure to toast the happy couple over our bank-holiday lunch, then again during a little zoom call after lunch, then at a larger zoom call with special gin from his mother-in-law, then with Champagne from our father, then back to wine because… honestly I can’t remember why we kept going, I think it was the Master-Mind rule, “we’ve started so we’ll finish”. At some point I tottered upstairs for a quiz with a bunch of friends, getting two questions wrong even though I knew the answer because I wrote the wrong letter down.
Finally, there is one more reason to celebrate. After 12 weeks of worry and strict rationing of supplies, the local council have finally sent us proper recycling bags!!! At last we can bring down the newspapers that we have had to store in the attic in carrier bags, no more shall we over-fill each orange bag to bursting in an effort to make them last as long as possible! Oh Frabcious day, Caloo Calay!!!
I hope you all find plenty of reasons of your own to celebrate this week, I look forward to hearing about them all.
Love and best wishes
Richard
Richard Wheatley BSc BPBH
- S.
“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 readily 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 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 hitchhiker 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.”
A Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; Primary phase